


Matchmaker, Matchmaker

by archea2



Series: Old Tales Twice Told [10]
Category: Sherlock (TV)
Genre: Christmas, Clueless Sherlock, Dimmock is not a nice person, Friends to Lovers, Humor, M/M, Matchmaker Sherlock, References to Jane Austen, Riddles, Romance, Spanking
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-02-15
Updated: 2015-09-02
Packaged: 2018-03-13 01:27:38
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 11
Words: 34,079
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/3362702
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/archea2/pseuds/archea2
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>"Sherlock Holmes, gorgeous, clever, God’s IQ made flesh (and cashmere), dancing his way through life’s enigmas with nary a care in the world nor a hair out of place – Sherlock Holmes was one lucky bastard."</p><p>Or: Sherlock tries to matchmake for his friends, Lestrade tries to stop him, and everyone else tries to keep up with the consequences. Yup, it's a modern fusion with Jane Austen's <i>Emma</i>. With a bit of casefic thrown in. And a spanking. (The fic can totally be read on its own, but some details will probably sound funnier if you have the original 'verse in mind.)</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

  * For [mycitruspocket](https://archiveofourown.org/users/mycitruspocket/gifts).



Sherlock Holmes, gorgeous, clever, God’s IQ made flesh (and cashmere), dancing his way through life’s enigmas with nary a care in the world nor a hair out of place – Sherlock Holmes was one lucky bastard.

And so said all of them who knew him, loved him, and kept a slightly breathless vigil through his best friend’s wedding. For there was a general consensus that John leaving 221B for good would be a tricky pass. Hadn’t he been Sherlock’s live-in “manny”? His companion of several years, who had taught Sherlock how to say _thank you_ , and _forgive me_ , and even, to general wonder, _Blowing up the elderly? Nah, I’ll stick to the riding-crop if I may_. And so everyone was very anxious to see how Sherlock would recover from his friend’s departure, even though the designated patient had made it clear that he didn’t mind a bit. After all, as he explained at length to whoever was willing to listen, _he_ was the reason why there was a wedding in the first place.

“They’d never have got together if not for me,” he crowed at intervals. Which was when Greg Lestrade would put down his pint, wipe a trace of foam from the corner of his mouth and tell him that was a bit too much cause-and-effect, even for Sherlock.

“Bollocks,” was what Lestrade actually said. “They met after your death, Sherlock, not because of it.”

“ _Post hoc, propter hoc_ , fuck _hoc_ ,” came the ripost with a pert toss of curls. But underneath, a cautious look would slip from Sherlock’s too-long eyes, dampening the sting of mischief. There was a quiet air about Greg Lestrade and everything he did, a mix of rugged and sweet, that caught on you after five years and made it difficult to close your ears and think of mischief when he had something to say.

“I know you miss John, and that’s fine. You wouldn’t be our lad if you didn’t. But trust me, he’d have fallen for Mary one way or another even if you’d been there playing piggy-in-the-middle. They’re just smitten with each other.”

“Not unless I’d made it possible for John to be attracted to someone else,” Sherlock griped. “And then, it still took a bomb for him to clinch the deal. A bomb which _I_ carefully and purposefully set on his path. No, they married because I made up my mind on the subject.”

“Your mind! You made a lucky guess, is what you made.”

“I never guess.” And there it was again. That fire, unholy light, blue-blazes emergency in Sherlock’s eyes, a signal for everyone else to grope for their seatbelts. But Lestrade, an old trooper in matters of Sherlock and trouble, merely shook his head and mussed Sherlock’s for good measure.

He should have known better. The next month saw not only Sherlock’s boredom well up until it reached a high-water mark of ennui, it saw him put his mind once again to the grind and come up with a fix.

“Molly,” he whispered one evening to Lestrade. Lestrade happened to be at 221B because he, along with a select ten or so, had received a formal invitation in Sherlock’s gawky handwriting. Most of the guests had come expecting some sort of murder party and were now pacing the room in subdued whispers, wondering when the lights would go out and if they would survive being a corpse in Sherlock Holmes’s living-room, that twilight zone of experiment. John and Mary were there as well as a number of Met acquaintances, one of whom was being pointed out to Lestrade. Literally pointed, since Sherlock’s other forefinger kept prodding Lestrade’s ribs while he basked in his Masterplan.

“Molly is still a celibate.”

“…Yeah?” Lestrade looked over to where Molly, in a green-and-white checkered dress and ceramic daisy earrings, smiled nervously. She looked blooming, but with a trace of her old shyness. “All in good time, I’d say. She’s had it pretty rough up to now, poor girl, but she’s weathered it well, and I know from experience –”

“I,” Sherlock cut in, “have found the perfect man for her. He’s a bit of a bore, and a yes-man, and I really wish he would stop repeating every last word I say, but at least he’s ethically sound. I have great hopes for the two of them." 

“Who?”

Sherlock wheeled his gaze to another corner. Pointedly.

“Oh Christ.” Lestrade could have slammed his forehead to the wall in protest, only there was another skull in the way. With horns.

“What? She is my _protégée_ ,” Sherlock said, bestowing a protective smile upon Molly. She waved back to them from across the room. So did D. I. Dimmock, a few steps farther. Other people caught the gesture and began their own ola, prompting Mrs Hudson to trot out of the kitchen with a bowl of her “naughty-naughty fruit punch”, as she liked to call it.

“Yeah, but you’re his _prodigy_. Ours,” Lestrade added on imperceptible second thoughts, touched and exasperated by Sherlock’s effort to play heaven to earth’s lonelyhearts. Part of him wondered if this was Sherlock trying to atone for two years of heartbreak among his friends; the whole of him hated the thought.

Sherlock’s gaze met his briefly. “You have always protected me,” he murmured, and for one instant the Sherlock who used them, mercilessly sometimes, who played with all their fate lines (and now love lines) like a kitten let loose in a wool factory – this Sherlock vanished, and another took his place. Only for a blink of the eye, and then Sherlock was back, crowing in triumph. 

“Much too cocky not to cock it up,” Lestrade reflected, unaware that he’d spoken aloud until he saw Sherlock frown at him. He shrugged. “Shut up and have a drink. And let us poor peons chose our mates for ourselves, 'cause there’s only so much data even you can weigh here, Sherlock.”

But Sherlock, releasing oodles of charm, had already collected Molly and was towing her, punch and all, to where Dimmock stood. A very pretty boy, Lestrade thought, watching the pretty boy’s ears flush to a deeper pink under his Sunday school crop, and a good enough boy. Only. Only…

“Greg!” John was standing before him on tiptoes, trying to snap him out of his reverie. “Long time no see, mate. Where are the police when you miss them?”

Greg parried with his own “What’s up, doc”, but kept his ear tuned to the pretty scene in the corner, where Sherlock had successfully backed his two preys. And was  now talking nineteen to the dozen, apparently praising a flustered Molly’s skills with the knifework.

“What’s he doing?” John had spotted the game too.

“Woolgathering,” Lestrade sighed.

“Of course, everyone can tell a nose from an ear,” Sherlock’s excited voice rose from the corner. “But it takes an exceptional mind, one dedicated to servicing the public services, to tell a rotten spleen from a spoiled liver. Right, Molly?”

“Liver,” Dimmock said breathlessly. He was taking notes on his buffet napkin, greasy as it was.

“Be wagging his tail next,” Lestrade thought.

“You know you’re actually saying that out loud?”

“And _that_ ,” Sherlock boomed on, “is what every young and promising police officer – like you, Dimples – should keep in mind when searching for a mate. Now, in this strictly hypothetical scenario of mine…”

“Jesus.” John still sounded incredulous. “Surely he’s realised that Dimmock has a boner for him? One that could pop a hole in the ozone layer?”

Greg shook his head mutely.

“And that he’ll never look at Molly twice, not when he thinks of Sherlock as his personal jackpot? The lodestar to his glittering career? Jesus, how can he be such a – nincompoop!”

“Because he’s a –” _spoiled brat who could answer every question at ten and was given way too much leverage by his Mummie, not to mention half of England_ , Lestrade didn’t answer. “Because he’s –” _so good-looking, and such an eye he has, the true pale blue of England’s footie kit when we flattened Mexico in ‘86,_ he didn’t try again. Instead, he lifted his hands and shoulders with a rueful smile. “Our Sherlock.”

“…you’re looking for someone who knows their morgue inside out,” their Sherlock concluded, patting Molly’s back with studied nonchalance. “In fact, Dimsum, why don’t you to join us on my next visit? Molly, when _is_ my next visit?”

“Can’t you speak to him? Or her?” John glanced up at Lestrade’s face and went for a gallant last stand. “Them? It can’t end well, that story.”

“It can only end in a bit of ding-dong. And no, not talking wedding-bells here.” When Lestrade looked again, it was to clamp down on a prickle of annoyance as Sherlock pointed, and Dimmock, following his cue, nearly knocked over Mrs Hudson to get Molly’s coat.

“Case of live and learn, John. Just – tell him I’ll be in touch, yeah?”

* * *

It didn’t end well.

Not through any fault of his, Sherlock told himself firmly the morning after the disastrous night before, while he curled up in his favourite chair, drawing up his knees under his chin and incubating his sulks. Mrs Hudson had knocked twice at his door since breakfast, but all Sherlock wanted to do was bask in hedgehog misery.

It wasn’t fair, really. He’d been so careful about it all. So methodical. Who else would have thought of making up a Venn diagramm for Molly and Dimmock, with its own clever Cupid’s arrows?

 

 

It was a shame that the Venn circles still refused to mingle socially, even after Dimmock started calling him in on his cases, which _had_ to be his unstated excuse for “Bring Molly to play”. Sherlock did, but nothing much happened in the course of the next three weeks. The cases were terminally inept, and every time he tried to duck into a cab at the end of one, Dimmock always seemed to know how to spot him in time. Then Sherlock was promptly un-ducked, before Dimmock treated the three of them to coffee and sugar, plus his own saccharine praise of Sherlock. Very nice and all that, but Molly was still a celibate and the endless gush of approval left Sherlock fretting between _too much_ and _not even close_. Then he was back at Baker Street, his own man again, and the feeling of no satisfaction stuck in him like a dull pulse.

Once, long ago, he’d taught himself that every person was like an iceberg with only the tip showing visible and the rest of them, the big underbelly of wants and needs, well underwater. Like every rule, there was one exception - an iceberg named Sherlock, all sharp-cold clarity, and therefore perfectly translucent to himself. Only, not quite. Because it was his own underwater self that apparently longed, very much longed for something that wasn’t there and that he couldn’t quite nab in his mind. A quieter brand of approval, perhaps? Recognition for what he was, yes, because he still craved that, but without the fuss, the buzz. The high, without the nausea. Praise that did not overpower you, but made its home in _just_ one nod, one warm flash of brown above a rugged smile that never changed with the years - kindling a trust that would endure too, year in year out, until... 

And then, light struck. Sherlock took another peep at his diagram and, lo and behold, there _was_ a match between pink and green:

 

 

He blinked.

He read.

He re-read.

He moved over to the window chair so he could check the words against the afternoon light. The light, looking in over Sherlock's shoulder, was a silvering grey - one-part sky, three-parts winter - and as it fell on the words, their plural turned imperative.

 _Trust Greg Lestrade_.

Now he thought of it, it had been weeks since he had last seen Lestrade. Perhaps a visit was in order? For him to acquaint the D.I. with his latest results, and – yes, ask for his advice. In fact, it had been weeks since he had consulted with Lestrade, who no longer called in to share his cases with him. Not even the big ones - not even his latest catch, that Sherlock had had to piece together from scratch and the tabloid press, the one with the adulterous doctor, the chicken and the nipple. He frowned. Remembrance of things past told him that here was something new; and Sherlock’s heart, gearing in before Sherlock’s mind had finished processing the facts, called it very bad news.

Unless Lestrade, who had seen him with the future ex-celibates, had just wanted to give him some free operating space? In which case, he would be happy to learn of Sherlock’s progress. Which Sherlock would now entrust to him. Because science never lied, and science had just said Lestrade was a trustworthy man, a good man. And Sherlock, who had been standing for the last leg of his reasoning before Lestrade’s door, under a silver-turned-pewter sky and a strafing rain, rang the bell and let the invisible pit in his chest fill with relief.  


	2. Chapter 2

“Oh, bugger,” was the good man’s cry of soul at his sight.

Sherlock scowled. “I don’t do umbrellas, as you should know by now.”

“Or coats today,” Lestrade muttered, grabbing his shivering, dripping, teeth-texting consultant and tugging him inside. “Or scarves, for that matter. Sweet baby Jesus. You know we’re two weeks short of Christmas, yeah?”

“Molly t-t-trusts you,” Sherlock almost said there and then. Instead, he let himself be escorted to his host’s small bathroom, plumped down on its seat of honour, and wrung out of the rain by Lestrade’s large hands armed with various-sized towels. When Lestrade moved past him, Sherlock leant impulsively sideways to catch the stay-at-home warmth off his body just as years earlier, at the hard peak of withdrawal, he had buried his face into the crook of Lestrade’s neck to inhale... not only the ghost of nicotine clinging to the man’s clothes, but his rock-solid presence underneath. Now one of the solid hands was pulling him back before he tumbled off the toilet seat, rearranging him against the rumpled linen of Lestrade’s shirt. Which was when the warmth finally closed in on Sherlock, bringing back sensation all over his skin in a thousand harmless, exquisite pinpricks. _Oh_.

“What? You’re giggling” Lestrade said, his own voice burred with laughter.

“It was the chicken,” Sherlock said quickly, letting himself be settled against Lestrade’s chest. “Manders let it rot for two weeks, so its gastric juices would become fatally toxic…”

“Sherlock.” A mild tug on his curls. “Not when I’m about to cook dinner.”

“…then injected his wife by way of her left nipple,” Sherlock went on, determined to re-establish his credentials with Lestrade. “Leaving no suspicious hole on her body. Then he threw her into the river, where the juices would blend into the natural process of decay, with her putrid guts –”

“Sher- _lock_!”

“You never asked!” Sherlock had to raise his voice against Lestrade’s roar – no, that was the hairdryer. He carried on all the same. “And I’m hungry. Mrs Hudson’s not home tonight, it’s one of her her Senior Dancing Queens’ evenings or whatever they're called, too busy to catch the terminology, and her shopping day is tomorrow because she likes to chat up the tomato man at the open market, that woman’s a talking menace, really, there has to be a name for that chatterbox pathology of hers, never stops, no wonder she’s dating a man called –”

But they were already in the kitchen, where Sherlock was met with more delicious sensations as he glanced down at the table. Lestrade was making risotto, he deduced from the open bottle of pinot blanc and the chopped onion, their soft-pungent notes tempered by the homey smell of...

“Chicken stock, yeah.” Lestrade’s tones were rueful, but the smile lingered in his eyes and mouth. He hooked his foot around one of the kitchen stools, pulling it out from under the table. “Be my guest. And, Sherlock? I didn’t call you in because I didn’t have to. Manders confessed yesterday. Went down the evil genius road and blabbed his masterplan to his girlfriend. Who freaked out, rather understandably, and told us. But I would have.”

“Have what?” He couldn’t help it. No more than he could help the odd, hungry satisfaction in the region of his chest as he picked up a few dices of raw onion and began to munch.

“Trusted you to get there first. What else? And stop that. Or you’ll get an oniony breath, Einstein, and throw yourself off scent.”

“...Molly trusts you.” Now they were back on track.

“Yeah? Oh, that.” Lestrade bent across the table to scoop up the rest of the onion firmly into his palm. “Yeah, we had a natter yesterday when I checked up with her about the p-m.” He crossed over to the pan which crackled with hot oil, stopping to crack his own mischievous smile at Sherlock. “You know, I wouldn’t be surprised if she found herself listening to a decent proposal before the month is out.”

Sherlock’s next hearbeat almost rocked him forward. Was this…?

“Can’t say a _filthy_ decent proposal, but it’s from one of us. One of the Filth.”

...Yes. Oh yes, oh _yes_ , it had to be. Of course, it was slightly vexing that Dimmock should have confided in Lestrade first, given Sherlock’s relentless efforts to point him right in the last six weeks. But only par for the course in Met territory. Ever since Sherlock had known him, he had seen Lestrade’s men and women come up to him with their problems; expecting him, because he was one of a kind, to be all things to them. And he’d watched Lestrade struggle to be all things, agony uncle, D.I. Claus, greying mentor, and remain cheerful until the last of them had toddled off home with his brownie point. And it made sense, too, that Lestrade would now bow to Sherlock’s prescience after weeks of being so annoyingly ‘eh?’ about his Molly project. Perhaps Sherlock would make him crank up the innuendo, just this once. Make Lestrade give him the full accolade he deserved. 

“Go on,” he said, smiling for himself.

“Well, Sally dropped a hint on our way back to the coop. That flat she’s moving in, that used to be her Gran’s –”

“ _Sally Donovan_?”

“ – it’s much closer to Barts’ than Molly’s little shoebox and Sal wouldn’t hear of a rent. Got thick as thieves, those two did, while you were away and poor Molly had to face the music for letting you use St Barts’ as an operation base. Sal stood up for her like a lion when I couldn’t. Did you know that? Sal said…”

Oh yes. Quite the speaker-up, ‘Sal’ was, when the fancy took her.

“…took her to Shepherd’s Bush, y’know, girls’ nights out…”

Sally Donovan had taken Molly out. His Molly. To concerts. Sherlock slumped lower under the enormity of the outrage and felt his mouth fill with the tart, bitter taste of – no, that was the onion. The rice and oil sizzling in sympathy, he admonished himself silently. He should have kept a tighter watch. Quizzed Molly the moment he was back, or even before, when he’d hidden in the shoebox and found those Jamaican walnuts in her spice cabinet. Walnuts!

“…so I said go for it, our Sal,” Lestrade concluded, giving the rice a manly toss and reaching out for the pinot. “Molly’s a great lass, and it'll do her loads of good to fraternise with a biped for a ch– ”

“She hasn’t said yes,” Sherlock cut in.

“Well, she’d be a fool to say no. Dunno if man is meant to be alone, but Molly Hooper clearly isn’t. And she’ll never get a cheaper flatshare north of the Thames.”

“With Donovan? It would be a, a – it would be a _degradation_.” Sherlock looked over to where Lestrade stood, propped against the countertop, his arms crossed and naked up to the elbow, where he had rolled up his shirtsleeves. For all that he called himself a pasta-by-number cook, Lestrade was as methodical in his kitchen as out in the field. And there was nothing hit-or-miss in the silence with which he greeted Sherlock’s hot, incautious last word.

“Molly’s my friend,” Sherlock tried again, wondering if a touch of sentiment would, well, mollify Lestrade’s hard stand.

“Is she, now.”

“And while I have no objection to her consorting with a member of the Force, have even encouraged her to do so, if you recall…”

“Oh, have you?”

Short, decided answers – not a good sign from Lestrade. Still, Sherlock had never been one to tiptoe where angels and SOCOs feared to tread.

“She has a much better partnership coming her way, if she will only trust me and wait a little! Dim...”

“Oh, f’Chrissake!” And Sherlock had to duck his head to avoid – not Lestrade’s hand, never that, because Lestrade would never do anything to harm him, but the white snowstorm that kah-boomed in every direction when he slapped his palm onto the countertop... and the open bag of rice. Lestrade began to swear under his breath, then clenched his mouth shut. Sherlock raised his thumb and finger to mimick that he should also lower the flame under the pan, to no avail.

“Look, I’m sorry that Granny Donovan out-yenta’d you. Tough luck and all that. But, Sherlock? If you think Molly has a claim on Dimmock, or that he gives a rat’s bogey about her feelings, then you’re…” A pause. Lestrade groping for a decent simile. “...Goofy of the Year. Dimmock’s a  nice boy and a decent officer, but he’s not interested in her. Not a bit. Why should he be? He’s a climber, she’s a lab tech.”

He paused, and Sherlock followed his eyeline as it rested on the open shelf and its heap of cooking pans, stacked into one another with the smallest pan lording it on top. He knew what would come next.

“He’s our youngest senior officer. Wants to make it to DCI before he’s forty. He – hell, think Mycroft meets Pac-Man meets Brainy Smurf, and you have Ted Dimmock. Why d’you think he’s been dragging you into his cases, only weeks before our clearance rates are due for inspection?”

“If he’s as dedicated to his work as you make him out, then he’s the perfect match for Molly.

“For the love of... Sherlock! Stop this frickin' nonsense! This is – this is not about you watching us stick-insects run about on crime scenes; this is me telling you about people. Good, messy people, with their work-in-progress hearts and chances that you’ve no right to mess up for them.”

“I’m not…”

“ _Listen_.” Up went Lestrade’s hand again, then thought better of it and braked on the downswing to grab a cloth. Lestrade’s forehead was gleaming with sweat as he wiped it, and he looked more rumpled than a man had any right to look on his day off, but strangely alight with the intensity of conviction. Sherlock listened, but only because he couldn’t stop looking. “Trust me on this. They’re funny business, hearts. And none of us can look into them better than their rightful owners.”

“Well, forgive me if I still think myself the better observer.” And Sherlock rose with as much dignity as he could muster with the treacherous rice still trickling out of his curls and into his collar. This was not how the evening should have gone.

He waited for a scathing “Save some for the wedding march,” but Lestrade only said “Good night” quietly before the blitzed risotto rose again from its pan in a black cloud. A smokescreen, that covered Sherlock’s exit into the deserted streets and the rain, by now the night rain, still pelting. And the night was cold, he found as he huddled in Lestrade’s doorway, willing for an empty cab to pass by. One did, then didn’t stop. A raindrop trickled from Sherlock’s front curl to the tip of his nose where it hung, adding insult to outrage while his stomach growled disapproval. Surely, he couldn’t still be hungry? And surely, surely, Lestrade couldn’t be right?

Doubt hovered with the raindrop before it fell to an invisible plop on the wet tarmac. Of course Lestrade was wrong. Of course Sherlock, who had known Molly so long and at such close quarters, knew what was best for her. Tonight, he would text her to offer a live-in position in 221B and a forfeit share in his cabs, telling her that he would be lost without her friendship. That should take care of the meddlesome Donovan, with her walnuts. Walnuts! As for tomorrow…but there was another cab coming up, and Sherlock stepped briskly out of hiding, his eyes full front so he would not be tempted to twist his head and check the one lighted window in the façade above.

He had a brief visual of Lestrade sitting in his kitchen with a disappointed face and a burnt risotto, and his breath snagged in his throat. But just then his phone stirred with a text from Dimmock. He was offering to show him and Molly their new mobile system for scanning fingerprints, and Sherlock’s pride crooned triumphantly over the parasite pang.

Tomorrow, he thought, watching London-by-night stream by each car window in horizontal fireworks. Tomorrow, he would solve that charade for good.

* * *

 

Dimmock’s overcoat flapped around his shoulders and hips like a hyperactive duckling as he walked them to his office.

Walked Molly, that is, since Sherlock had been very firm about keeping three steps behind them, even in the lift.  Marrying, Sherlock had learnt recently, was the game that two and only two could play – he had John’s wedding pics and a murderer-photographer’s word for it. And so he had tricked Molly and her paramour into a headstart by bending over to fix his shoelaces. And, later on, socks. And once – but that was when the wolf-whistles had drawn the chief superintendent from his office, and Sherlock had to cut and run.

On catching up with the happy pair, Sherlock had been a bit discomfited to find them discussing Dimmock’s smurf collection. But wait! Smurfs, Sherlock’s mind palace supplied, were a) popular, b) rather difficult to tell apart, and c) vertically challenged. Perhaps the smurfs were a clever code, and they were really discussing _children_?  A relieved Sherlock closed Dimmock’s office door for him and turned to the future parents with a  smile so bright it appeared to congratulate even the drab metallic desk and the phone on it.

But Dimmock only said “Welcome to Q-branch” and immediately busied himself with his MobileID. He did ask for Molly’s hand, but only so he could place her little finger on the screen of the small, phone-shaped apparatus. He showed them how the machine recorded a print, then checked it within the next seconds with the national database. Molly went pink-cheeked through the entire operation and said fingerprints made lovely designs, didn’t they? Her sister, an art teacher at Slade’s, had told Molly about those people, artists, who could draw entire landscapes just by applying paint to the canvas with their fingertips. One of them had even made a complete portrait of his mother-in-law.

Dimmock said that sounded like the sort of challenge only a genius could undertake. He was still grabbing Sherlock’s ring finger as he spoke.

Sherlock, fretting at the inane talk and wanting his finger back, said anyone could fingerpaint an old woman. Seriously? All they had to do was use the loops and whorls to figure the rhytides, or facial wrinkles, which was really child’s play. No, the real challenge would be to draw a portrait of a subject in her collagen prime, her mitotic cycle still in the run, and her epithelial cells…

…Oh! _Ooooooh_!

“Sherlock?” Both Molly and Dimmock were looking at him with concern.

“Your birthday,” he told Molly in non-negotiating tones, “is in a fortnight.”

Molly bit her lower lip. “Actually, that's Chris…”

“Irrelevant.” Sherlock raised his voice. "Molly, I have made a decision. In two weeks from now, Detective Inspector Dimbo and I will gift you with a state-of-the-art digital portrait of yourself, made with _every fingerprint of every criminal you have helped us catch_.”

“As a Christmas present?” Molly looked doubtful.

But already Dimmock was rushing into the gap, his overcoat rippling with suppressed excitement. What could he do? He _had_ to do something. Would be glad, sodding glad, sorry, would be delighted to gang up with Sherlock on this wonderful, marvelous, incredible project, in fact, now was as good a time as any to get things going, if Sherlock would only follow him…

To CRIMINT? Sherlock’s brain was swirled with disbelief as Dimmock uttered the word and he took it in. This was a no-man’s zone for him, even after years of begging and pleading with Lestrade to let him access the Met's unrivaled database. Lestrade had never budged. He’d bent rules for Sherlock before, he said, and odds were he’d do it again, come what may  – but CRIMINT was a whole other level of no. CRIMINT held seven million information reports, and there was no way in hell he’d let Sherlock dig into them unvetted.

He was still trying to process this momentous turn of events while he took out his phone and snapped a picture of Molly, her cheeks still pink, her smile cheerful  as she waved back their goodbyes. Dimmock’s sounded very chipper for a new-fashioned romantic. Especially one who was leaving his love interest behind, but Sherlock did not, could not think of anything as he was escorted back into the lift in what felt like a sped-up reverse shot of their entrance.  The lift doors closed, and the next thing he knew, Dimmock and he were alone in the cabin for a tete-à-tete ride.

 **  
** Or perhaps not. For just as Sherlock was about to speak, wondering if he could get Dimmock’s password to the pharaonic database by promising to let him deliver the portrait to Molly, once done, he found his attention required in another quarter. Dimmock, it seemed, had just given their tete-a-tete the lie by closing upon Sherlock and  – without scruple  – without apology  – without much apparent shyness  –  matching his hand to Sherlock’s left buttock cheek.


	3. Chapter 3

Hand.

And buttock.

Dimmock’s.

His.

For one moment, Sherlock’s mind, catching up with this new and startling database, struggled to make a connection. Meanwhile, the rest of him had sprung into action and was busy uncoupling Exhibit A from Exhibit B before holding the former up for inspection.

“Wrong address,” came in what Sherlock hoped were still playful tones, well, grittily playful. Then, hot upon the heels of outrage, light struck. Dimmock squirmed in his grasp, his pretty-boy’s face a study in confusion, but Sherlock simply sneaked his thumb under Exhibit A and dropped his gaze.

“Systolic pulse peak. High-functioning erection. Really, Dimmest. I’ve no idea what your mother told you, but there’s no need to take your libido out on a male proxy, not in this day and age. She’s an anatomist, you know.”

“My _mum_?” Dimmock’s voice had gone squeaky.

Sherlock rolled his eyes. “Your fiancée, Ted. Anatomist by trade, enthusiast by nature, and the best confident a man could wish for, so there’s your little problem taken care of. Not that I won’t be happy to, ah, receive any compliment on her behalf and pass it on. But if it’s a hormonal flux capacitor you need, just turn that lift back, there’s a good fellow, while I text Molly.”

“Molly!” His interlocutor tried to cross his arms, with poor results since one of them was still in Sherlock’s custody. “What’s she to got do with this?”

Sherlock blinked. “Anything. Everything. Given that you’ve been paying attention to her –”

“Me, hooking up with Molly Hopper!” He was cut off by Dimmock’s snort, expelled with such force from his nostrils - the man’s strongest feature - that it put them on vibrate. “What d’you take me for? Nice career boost that would be, me going out with a girl half the Met know was having a bit of nooky with Moriarty. Did you even look at her?”

Sherlock looked at him.

“She’s a good sort, yeah, but hardly my cup of all right. Now you, Mr Holmes... During all those weeks when you answered _every_ call of mine, worked _every_ case, even the dull ones I threw out as a test… all that time, we’ve understood each other.”

“Oh, have we?”

“This place.” Dimmock’s nod of chin encompassed, not the bare frame of the lift, but all the men and women invisible on its other side, the shabby, lively bustle that filled London’s oldest crimefighting arena. “It needs younger men, and you know it. Not the ever-sodding rota of old sadsacks, like the one who arrested you. Or take Lestrade. Not that he is the worst of this lot…”

“Is he, now?” And Sherlock, facing the cheap little pipsqueak and fighting the disgust in his soul, knew that he was channeling a stronger, better voice as he spoke.

“But he’s done his time.” Dimmock’s voice turned lower, a you-and-me sickening hush. Sherlock had to repress a flinch when the moist breath touched his cheek.

“And you know it, or you wouldn’t have led me on the way you did. Come on, Sherlock. You need someone who will turn a blind eye to your little ways, like I did back in the Van Coon case. Who… will make sure you get all the stuff you need, when you need it.” Was there an innuendo in the hot-pressed words? “I’ll do it for you. Play nice if you do. It will get me far, and it will get you…” Dimmock’s hand brushed his hip this time, tentatively, as he went out on a limb and a leer. “…high.”

The lift shook under the shift of balance. It wobbled, heaved, growled, and settled into uneasy levitation due to Dimmock’s nostrils being on the receiving end of Sherlock’s ire, and the emergency stop button being on the receiving end of Dimmock.

“My apologies, Inspector.” Sherlock had to raise his voice over the other's groans. “I’m seldom wrong when sizing up _ordinary_ people, but it seems that I’ve made a tremendous error in your favor. Thanks and all that for pointing me to your true feelings so I can keep Molly – my friend Molly, by the way, who kept me alive so I could be of use to you lot – well out of them. Oh, and Dimmock? If you have one watt of understanding left in that skull of yours, you’ll think twice before you insult Lestrade before me. Now go home and nurse that watt.”

“Twat,” Dimmock echoed furiously from the floor. And the rest was silence, with swelling resentment (and nose) on one side, and deep mortification on the other, until one of them finally noticed that the lift had stopped and sent it back on its way with a dignified scowl.

 

* * *

 

No, it hadn’t ended at all well. And Sherlock, huddled once more in his armchair, wished that he could let go of the idiotic scene.

He turned up the collar of his dressing-gown so that the soft fabric would reach his cheek like a tiny _hey there_ , leaning into the downy touch. As a child, he’d been a tactile little person; had a dear room in his mind filled with enchanted sensations, from the gold-rough curls of a labrador to the cold lick of the sea over his toes, in their brilliant Cornwall holidays, and the first, frictionless glide of small fingertips on a block of rosin, before he’d even clutched his first violin. 

Then touch had faded away, a loser to sight and smell in Sherlock’s detecting days, until all his days had collapsed into his two gapyears, out of touch, almost ankylosed with the long, dreary waiting and the string of cold countries, until it had resurfaced in pain. In the low-lying Siberian bunker. And then... someone had touched him kindly. Touched him from the heart. Someone had sealed Sherlock’s peace with closeness, even though his scars had hurt like fire in the hug. Someone who, recently, had been cleverer than him because his wits came from the heart, from being - what was that awful phrase Mrs Hudson loved to use? "People-savvy", yes.

Perhaps all that heart business had made Sherlock vulnerable. Or Dimmock’s gesture would have roused such a tangle of emotions in him. Anger, yes, at the crude, _amateur_ overture. Only, not just. Because Sherlock could still feel his shudder, his revulsion at Dimmock touching a tender part of him that was not his to fondle or grab, and not just the proud round curve under his trousers seat.

Then of course, it had been long since anyone had touched him there. Even the Russians had been very gracious about stripping him down to the waist and no further, though he probably had Mycroft to thank for that. And they hadn’t  found that other hidden part, the tender verso to his acerbic self, that even  _alone_ could not shield, though _alone_ was all he had and all he wanted to have.

* * *

 

“Are you sure?” Molly asked. It was already two days later and Sherlock was still in his dressing-gown; only now, they were sorting out bees.

She was there as a visitor. Much to Sherlock’s surprise, she had said "no" to moving in with him, although she hadn’t mentioned  Donovan either. Merely told him that she would stay at the shoebox for the time being, _alone_ went unspoken, and travel to Baker Street when he needed a companion. Sherlock, stirred by vague memories of crap telly evenings, had shown proper appreciation by kissing her on the forehead.

“I’m the doctor, you know,” she’d told him with her crinkly smile, before they went to work. 

Locked-room mystery. Well, almost. One puncture mark on Doctor Roylott’s neck, in Doctor Roylott’s sixth-floor flat just across Fortnum and Mason’s rooftop - with its rows of beehives, all painted a trendy dark blue (“So sweet!” - “Nope, the hives will get  too hot in summer”). And there had been a bee in the room along with Roylott, dead too, her fur still dotted with pollen from the doctor’s exotic blooms. He collected orchids. So there had been no inquest, Molly said. Only, perhaps it went with the job, but she had that funny feeling : they should really, really anatomize the speckled bee.

And now they were looking at pictures on his computer, and Sherlock could feel every effort she made to be cheerful. He swallowed past the hurt and humiliation - hers, this time - and froze the golden parade. 

“There’s” - he turned to her a little stiffly - “someone out there for you. There's always someone, Molly. And I swear I’ll find him.” 

“Are you sure?” she asked. And then, before his outraged gaze: “That you shouldn’t begin at home?” 

“You... want me to marry you?”

This earned him a more earnest giggle. “No, silly. To find your own Mr Right.”

“Please. I'm not about to join the vast herd of people who see marriage as a retraining course…” 

“Meaning me?”

“...or a trading profit, or profitable trade,” Sherlock went on hastily. “Count me out.”

“But you’ve changed, Sherlock. Ever since you’ve been back. You’re more... giving, you know, and receiving, more open. Perhaps you’ll change your mind...oops! Bad Molly.”

Sherlock was still frowning. “Why does everyone think that sharing your tooth glass with another protects you from aging, or getting bored, or getting to be a bore? I can’t see why I couldn’t age brightly  _and_ gracefully on my own. Not when I'll still have the advantage of an active and busy mind. Perhaps I’ll learn Classical Tibetan - it’s a fascinating language, from the little I've heard. Or make up sudokus.”

“Sherlock. The one time you filled a sudoku, you ended it with 9.5.”

Sherlock was waving the objection away when there was a knock at the door. When Sherlock yelled “Go away, Mrs Hudson! Not a talking day!”, the door immediately opened, and Mary Watson's blond head appeared.

“Well, that’s too bad, because you really want to hear what we have to say." 

“Not _another_ baby?” Sherlock looked horrified.

“No, you ninny. Now let us in so we can tell you the big news. You’re not the only stray pigeon who flew home, you know.”

“What do you - “ But Sherlock, even as he rose from his armchair, fell silent at the sight of Mary’s companion. The man was fair-haired, close-cropped, with a creased forehead and a tanned hand which he now extended to Sherlock. But there stopped the resemblance with John Watson, for the man was as tall as Sherlock, making it possible to look at him full front while he crossed the living-room floor in two long strides, lithe as a panther and with a panther's eyes of pure gold and nerves.

  
“Sebastian Moran,” said the man. He stared at Sherlock golden-eyed, smiling, the light wrinkles on each side of his eyes sharpening his face into a battlefield, and asked, “Irkutsk or Azerbaijan?"


	4. Chapter 4

“How do you…” The words were out before Sherlock could stop them.

 

But already Mary was stepping between them, clasping an arm around each narrow hip with a beaming smile. “Don’t let him tease you, Sherlock. He knows the answer better than anyone else – he was the one that got you clean.”

 

Molly’s mouth fell open. She half stood up before sitting again, her gaze tip-toeing from one tall man to another until it paused on Sherlock for confirmation. “I thought that was…”

 

“Spy lingo,” the man Moran said. He tipped her a grin, followed by a wink, and Sherlock didn’t have to look over his shoulder to see the hot-pink flush rising up Molly’s cheeks.

 

“Sebastian headed the team that exfilled Sherlock out of Russia. And he had loads of fun, I bet, and was the heart and soul of the party. Right, Seb? Then he gave everyone the slip and flew back to Kabul instead of heading home for a long, long overdue visit to his fatherland.”

 

“Blame the CIA.” Seb rolled both shoulders and his head in a display of charming helplessness, although Sherlock could see him putting the show to good use. He watched Seb watching, taking in Sherlock’s cluttered living-space and stripping it down to a pure vision of lines, angles and volumes, all in a flash, a golden flash. Oh, but this was new. This was the Perfect Novelty, and Sherlock clung to it.

 

“What can I say? They just won’t let me go. Bunch of grumpeeters, our dear ‘Cousins’ can be when one of us asks for a leave. We can’t all cut and run like you, Mary.”

 

“Oh.” Of course, Molly had known Mary only as a white-out bride, morphing into a suburban housewife, morphing into the mother of another blond, short and occasionally bellicose Watson. “You’re…”

 

“Was.” Mary faced her, all soft cheekbones and creamy dimples. “But it got a little tedious, being an executive, and so I put my – executing days behind me. Not so Mr Leprechaun here, with his coppery hair and Irish twinkle. It’s all play and no work with you, isn’t it, Seb?”

 

Sherlock had shuttered out their banter. After three days of indoor moping, he found himself once again swirled by curiosity and excitement, magnetized by the elephant in the room, the tall presence whose eyes had come to rest again on him. Making him fair game to Sebastian Moran, as if… A thought crossed Sherlock’s mind, blazing a brilliant trail: _Have I met my match_?

 

He forced himself to sift his own breath, tame his inconvenient pulse. Moran was still being charming to the two women, no, three, since the room had apparently produced one more, frolicking about as she spoke of tea and a message for Sherlock and _oh then Mr Moran you’ll have to come back and taste my dal, not the real thing of course but the next best thing, recipe straight from the horse’s mouth, well, stallion really_ , _just ask Sherlock here._.. Then more noises, faster and higher-pitched, and _hush you, better keep that for your young woman, Mr Moran_ …Sherlock tuned out both curry and horse, and started again. From the top.

 

Which meant Moran’s shiny cap of hair, less coppery than _blond fauve_ , Sherlock’s coiffeur Antoine would call it. Probably moaning at the raw elegance of Moran’s crewcut, smoothed over the man’s scalp and temples until it tapered into a soft point at the back of his…

 

“Here.” And Moran, reading him, turned on his heel. The motion underscored his casual clothes, the pocket design on his jeans that screamed 2005 and the leather jacket bunched up over his midriff that screamed ©JohnWatson. Fresh from the plane, then, with only a couple of hours to call his own before reporting to his handlers, and he’d spent them on getting a London haircut. To impress – Sherlock?

 

Who then noticed the scar, prowling up Moran’s bare neck until it blended into the tawny hair. The casual scar with its two-headed design that was in itself unique, because each scar, like a fingerprint, could damn its owner from anonymity if you only knew how to look. Sherlock did, and stilled at the sight.

 

“You’re the Colonel.”

 

“Was,” Moran said, much in Mary’s previous pleasant tones. He faced Sherlock again. “You nearly had me in New Delhi. Your brother suggested that I…distract you with a chocolate ice cone. Rather typical of him, I'd say?”

 

Pieces were falling, not apart but together, remains of the past year coalescing as quickly as Sherlock called them up in his active mind. Jim's second-in-command, the last thread of a web that had stretched from Teheran to the Western Himalayas. A heavy game, leading Sherlock from one cache of Moriartists to the other, only for their leader to give him the slip in each of their skirmishes. Sherlock had wondered, then, at this so good, so gauche adversary, who couldn’t seem to escape without kicking down a domino or two in his hurry. Now he understood.

 

Not Moriarty’s man. Mycroft’s mole – and the edition came with a jolt of annoyance. His brother had never admitted to any contact with “the Colonel”, and even if he had, wouldn't have yielded a syllable of real information. All general approbation and smoothness, not a jot of data. And Sherlock was the one people thought went all anal about his…secret supplies. _Ha_.

 

Unless…

 

Unless there was a very good reason why Mycroft wasn’t too keen on mentioning...

 

“When did he recruit you?” he asked, pressing, charming, too, turning his curiosity into a bait. Moran, who had been trading chit-chat with Mrs Hudson about – card tricks, of all topics, did not look surprised.

 

“The two of us? Not so long ago, _mo chara_. Yesterday, when England’s troubles seemed not so far away. Mr Mycroft Holmes was looking for wolf to eat wolf, and for us Morans to track down his Irishman’s networks in Asia. Which we did. And then…and then I’m afraid my dear cousin nearly wolfed him down. Dixon Moran, heir to the name; you ladies probably remember him from _Newsdays,_  lolling on a settee in a pompadour.”

 

Sherlock’s heart gave a wicked beat. He thought back to the early days of his own return, and his many interviews with a Mycroft who had looked _very_ hot under his button-down collar when asked if he’d found anyone to his liking. And just as hot and bothered when demanding that Sherlock catch the traitor at the Home Office. A traitor whose name and connection with North Korea – one of Mycroft’s elect playgrounds – he had heard without a flinch, only nodding once before dismissing Sherlock with a swan-like undulation of fingers.

 

If the betrayal had struck even closer home...

 

If - and Sherlock’s mind, fired by the mental image, caught it and spun it into a Hollywood-sized picture - Mycroft had let the dashing Lord Moran woo him over lazy sofa afternoons and Korean politics… if Mycroft had, in fact, made a complete fool of himself only to suspect that Dixon Moran had chosen a richer partner, uniting himself with Pyongyang for better or worse… passing on to Pyongyang information that he’d got straight from the horse’s mouth, as Mrs Hudson would say… oh, this was too good to let pass. This could be the golden gate to years worth of taunting Mycroft, if only Sherlock got proof.

 

He cast a quick glance over to the table, where the women had reconvened to look at Molly’s pictures of the dead bee. Then he addressed Moran again.

 

“I once called your cousin a rat. But a wolf…comes with interesting suggestions. They were close, then?”

 

Moran’s eyes studied him, bright with their own wickedness. “I’d call it a perfectly good understanding…” He checked himself. “But I can’t really say. I only saw it from the outside and a faraway outside – I was the cousin on the Cousins' side, remember. If anyone’s the better judge, it should be you, Sherlock Holmes, who can tell people at a glance –” the hard glow softened into admiration – “and who've known him from childhood.”

 

“We’ve been children together,” Sherlock amended wryly. “As for knowing him, I’d have to get past forty years of him being practically perfect in every way and everyone’s opinion, and…”

 

“What are you two talking about?” Mary called from the table, motioning them closer. “Sherlock, you haven’t touched your tea!”

 

“Rats and wolves and relatives,” Moran answered promptly. With a glance at the computer screen, he carried on, “And bees, and even one dead chicken. Now we’re talking business, Mr Holmes - oh, I may? Goody! Sherlock, that’s why I asked Mary to bring me here. To tell you and Miss Hooper about the other Mr Holmes’s plans. Then I suppose I’ll have to go and report to him.” He looked less than thrilled at the idea.

 

“Oh, then I’ll leave you to it, dears. No, don’t bother, Mr Moran. No, really, don’t – someone has to be the chai-wallah in this house, now that dear John’s gone, and I – yes, Sherlock, going, going, gone. Oh, but. Oh my!” And Mrs Hudson stopped, one hand up a purple-clad breast while the other juggled the tray, cups, teapot, sugar pot and a number of other potty items with the ease born of practice. “I’m such a fuzzhead! That message for you, Sherlock – it’s from your mother. No, no, she’s quite all right.”

 

“I didn’t ask.”

 

“She says not to arrive before twelve or after the 23rd, dear, and that you’re allowed one guest of your own since Mycroft is bringing so many friends. Oh, and it has to be one whose notion of chemistry is limited to clapping when James Stewart kisses Donna Reed in _It’s A Wonderful Life_. Now, I've no idea what she means by that, but –”

 

“Mycroft.” Sherlock waited until the door had shut out Mrs Hudson on a kind but firm click. He turned his back on it and faced his audience, distaste stretched all down his features. “Mycroft is planning _a Christmas party_?”

 

“A Christmas task force, love.” Mary caught her neighbour’s cardigan sleeve between thumb and finger as she rose with a mumble about a trepanning at five. “Don’t go, Molly, you’re in it too. We all are. Tell them, Seb.”

 

“Well. Where to start.” Seb sauntered over to the table and leant both elbows on its top, his face alert with that mix of rakish and relaxed that made it unlike any other face in Sherlock’s collection, crooks and angels alike. “I suppose everyone remembers old Jim playing peek-a-boo twelve months ago?”

 

Everyone remembered, yes. Some with a shudder, one with a shrug.

 

“And then...nothing. A bad joke, we were told. All clear on the Western front, ding, dong, the bogeyman’s dead. Only, it seems that things have been a little murkier down below. There have been – signs, lately. Cases, odd little affairs of people committing a watertight murder only for the case to trip itself and blow up rather spectacularly in their faces. Man kills his wife with a chicken, the perfect murder, really, only he’s also stupid enough to trumpet the whole thing. Or take that Roylott case. Man found dead with a dead bee at his side and a case history of anaphalyxis. Case dismissed, no questions asked – except for the tiny, troublesome fact that the bee…”

 

“I knew it!” Molly’s eyes were as bright as her voice, the pathologist overcoming the shy girl into whom she relapsed now and then. “There _was_ something with that bee?”

 

Moran smiled at her. “Nothing wrong with it, Doctor, except for two things – it’s dead, and it cannot sting. It’s a…”

 

“ _Melipolina ferruginea_. Stingless bee.” Sherlock held out his mobile screen for all to see. “My vote is for the Brazilian species, though I’ll need a better close-up, Molly.”

 

“And our second winner is Mr Sherlock Holmes from Baker Street! Quite right. That bee wouldn’t know a sting if it bit him in the…abdomen, as your brother very delicately put it. An expert in creepie-crawlies, is Holmes the Elder.”

 

“Takes one to know one,” Sherlock muttered.

 

“So you see, once again, we have our perfect crime – the wound on Roylott’s neck a class A facsimile, the needle exactly calibrated, the poison – well, I’m more the shooting type myself, but apparently the poison copies the venom to a tee. Or bee. But the bee itself is all wrong. And why, why would anyone import the wrong bee from Brazil and plant it in the room just so it could give them away?”

 

“Anyone being –” Mary, who looked as if she already knew. It must be in the magazines Mrs Hudson was so keen on storing in John’s old room. He’d tried reading one and stopped after the journalist had used _glamorous_ five times in four lines and then cunningly switched for _glammy_ and _totes_   _glam_.

 

“Roylott’s step-daughter, Helen. Stunner, but with no income of her own and a taste in expensive black lace tops. She’s still being…helped along the road to confession." Moran’s tones were bland. “But we already know she didn’t do it on her own. She clearly had no idea that the bee was a fake.”

 

“That sounds very much like Jim.” Molly’s tones weren’t much louder, but they rang clear and full of purpose. “To invent horrible perfect crimes, and then find a way of letting people know that he’d done them. He is alive, then? Alive and hiding and, and, and wanting us to know?”

 

Her shoulder was squeezed with a motherly hum. “It could be someone else," came from Mary. "Someone who's studied him well enough to copy his ways.”

 

“ _Cherchez le fan_ ,” Sherlock said absently, his mind crackling from a fever of possibilities as the night came on, and the rain, until the first electric signs across Baker Street were reflected in blurry reds and blues on his windows.

 

“What about you, Moran? What do you think?”

 

“Sebastian. Or Seb. Please. I think that it’s too soon to think anything definite. But if you ask me what I _sense_ , that’s another matter. I sense a pattern. Perhaps it’s the animals – Jim loved them, dead or alive. Had me take all those selfies with tigers before he’d even let me... but you don’t need to know about that.”

 

“Well, Seb, it’s been quite a yarn.” Mary was rising and, as always in such occasions, all of Sherlock’s guests found themselves shuffling to their feet in mimetic sympathy. “But I’ve left Viola with John all this afternoon and she’s two teeth ahead on her schedule. Sherlock, we’ll be seeing you next week at Christmas?” Her smile left him with no doubt that they would, or that Christmas would see Sherlock at his parents’ house, which Mycroft was apparently busy turning into a Secret Santa Ops Headquarters.

 

“I should go too,” Molly said. She turned to find that Moran had rescued her parka from under his and Mary’s and was shaking it out for her. “Oh,” Molly said faintly, and Sherlock wondered if she would remember to – but as she stooped a little for Moran to adjust the coat on her shoulders, she blinked in his direction, and he came over to kiss her cheek. This had become a routine he rather liked.

 

Moran said he was kipping at the Watsons’ and left on a handshake and a bright "Pleasure!".

 

And Sherlock, in all of thirty seconds, found himself without anyone in a room filled only with the pitter of rain against his windows.

 

He took a few paces, probing at this new feeling of emptiness. He thought of Moran and tried to recapture the man’s supple liveliness, his smile, his uninhibited pleasure at being the hunter again after two years of being Sherlock's prey. Oh yes, Moran was interesting. And he’d enjoyed himself this afternoon – definitely enjoyed himself, and made no secret of his interest in Sherlock. It would be pleasant, Sherlock thought, to see him again.

 

Still.

 

"Bring a friend of your own," his mother had said, probably meaning John. But John was already booked as Mycroft’s guest. And this year Mycroft would also bring Molly, and Moran, and even Sherlock himself. With a growing sense of abomination, Sherlock realized how deeply he’d let himself be tricked. This year, he wouldn’t come home as the prodigal son, fussed back to health with potatoes and blankets. Instead, he - and all the others - would come as part of Mycroft’s _homework_.

 

Sherlock, staring into his empty fireplace, smouldered.

 

And then, he bounced into action. His phone was at his ear, and it was only when he heard the voice, gravelly voice, _friendly_ voice say ‘Yeah?’ rather heavily that Sherlock knew whom he’d called. In that instant, everything felt clear. He would face this chance of seeing Moriarty again, and he would come as his brother's helper, and all of it would come to no good, possibly.

But, at the very least, he would come prepared.

  
“Lestrade?” he asked, trying to ban the excited relief from his voice and not entirely sure he succeeded. “So, Inspector. Doing anything interesting next week?”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Sorry about the delay in posting, m'dears - work has had to come first, sadly.
> 
> And yes, I've just remembered that Sherlock had to be exfilled from Serbia, not Russia. Aaaahem. Let's call it poetic licence, shall we?:)


	5. Chapter 5

“Going my way, boss?”

It was morning, pure shy early Christmas morning, with a touch of snow in the wind. Lestrade stood on the kerb sniffing happily at the tang of cold, a week-end bag at his feet. He bent to inspect the driver’s grin and gave as good as he got.

“Nah, I’m off to Highbury. Good ol’fashioned country party, and that’s when my car had to give up on me. Bloody…”

“Car-ma.” She’d beaten him to it, one mouth corner tugged down in cheerful resignation. “Hop in, sir. I’m on family duty and my people live on the Surrey border, I’ll give you a lift.”

The sun came out while they boarded the A3, and Lestrade’s spirits rose even further in its wake. His eyes skimmed over the rough-sweet landscape as the view cleared up on each side of the car, letting him pick this and that from the frosted fields that streamed past his window. His mind played along, picking, remembering. _Please_ , Sherlock had texted him. Twice:  after Lestrade had said he was expected at his sister’s for the hol (his local tap-room, more like, not that he was letting Sherlock in on that), and after he’d already made his choice.  _You once said to keep you in the loop. I am_. Lestrade’s heart had given a jolt at the awkward syntax, so unlike Sherlock, and the jolt had looped him into a web of past hurts and present hopes, down to Sherlock penning – or texting – him a proper invitation. They hadn’t crossed paths since the calamitous rice evening at Lestrade’s, but Sherlock obviously thought it was time to make up. 

Well, not make up, because Sherlock wasn't one to own he’d been in the wrong. Not even after being hoisted by his own petard and nearly wrecking Scotland Yard’s veteran elevator in the blow-up. But if Sherlock was willing to bury their quarrel, Lestrade, dozed into peace and good will by the monotonous landscape, would ride that extra mile with him.

His eyelids grew heavy until he allowed himself to slump back against the upholstered seat and see it all. He would come in to find Sherlock alone with his newest worshipper, Miss Viola S. Watson, and Sherlock, knowing how Lestrade had grieved at the lack of little Lestrades in his once-married life, would make a show of petting the child and dancing her in his arms. Oh, but Lestrade wouldn’t give in so quickly. Wouldn’t make it easy-peasy-lemon-squeezy for the incorrigible charmer, not he. First he would put on his bossiest voice, with his thickest Somerset burr, but then... but then he’d smile, ’course he would, and take the baby from Sherlock’s arms so they could sit before a peat fire (surely they had peat fires in Surrey?), all three of them, and share –

“…champagne and roast turkey _a la_ Holmes.” Donovan had been speaking for a while, it seemed. Taking his rapturous grunts for signs of approval, too. He wanted to ask how she knew but his thoughts felt all gummed together after the long car nap. “Himself being such a turkeycock. What’s their place like, sir? Splashed all over the estate, with a butler’s skeleton in every closet?”

But Lestrade’s notes, hastily written down under John’s directives (Sherlock, predictably, had left it to him to deduce his parents’ coordinates) spoke of a cottage. And the country path they had turned into spoke of spruce and ivy and black privet, whirled into the same unruly length of hedge by the rain which had caught up with them, not walls and moats and majestic oaks.

"Blast," Donovan said, cranking up the windscreen wipers. The shower was heavy, but promised to be short. "Is that their drive? I’d better make it all the way to the door or you’ll be soaked. Just, I’m not coming in with you. Holmes made it clear he’ll have nothing to do with me and, for the record, the feeling is –"

The engine roared, then shrilled. Lestrade’s younger days of high, two-wheels-off-the-ground speed races kicked in just in time for him to grab the safety handle before she swerved them hard. He heard their tyres crunch into the frost-covered grass as something black, blurry and at least twice their size zoomed past the sideways. 

"The fuck was…" Lestrade, half into her lap, angled his neck back. The rain was making it difficult to peer round the lane entrance. "This is Corncrack Drive, right?" 

But Sally was busy wrenching the driver’s door open so she could lean out halfway and yell at the indifferent taillights. "It’s a _police_ woman you’re cutting off, big boy!"

They view to the cottage was now blocked by the new vehicle. It looked like a delivery truck, with some motto spelled out in flowery curlicues on its flank, though it was much larger than any specimen in Lestrade’s recollection. They must have taken a wrong turning, he reasoned with himself. The best thing would now be to back off and check again with the main road. He imparted his view to Donovan, who immediately cupped her hands around her mouth and yelled, "We’re not backing off! Wanker! Call yourself a man and can’t even blow your horn properly?"

"Sal!" And then, just then, they heard a horn. Except it came from behind, its fainter, graceful note almost drowned in the rain. Lestrade blinked, recognizing Molly Hooper’s little yellow Mazda. Sherlock had never mentioned... 

"It’s Molly," he told Donovan. "I’ll go and tell her to pull over. I mean, turn round. Christ. There has to be a back lane to their front lane, right?"

"There’s a _purpose_ to amber – did you say Molly?" And, like this, Donovan had swung both legs out of the open door and was running to the other car. Lestrade watched as Molly’s window was lowered and her face popped into the gap, only to disappear behind the umbrella that Donovan had taken with her. They exchanged a few invisible words, then Donovan’s head reappeared as the umbrella was folded again and pushed gently through the opening, and he had a glimpse of Molly’s agitated face before Sally ran back to their car.

“Told her how she’d better go round,” she said before starting the engine without another word. Lestrade touched her wet wrist on the driving wheel, but knew better than to comment. It was enough that he’d seen her be so pleasant and so kind, and that Molly had seen it too. It made them twice-over partners, he and she, on some obscure plane which had everything to do with their messy hearts. He thought of saying _I’ll speak to her_ , then thought again.

“She asked if ‘Seb’ was with us.” Sally’s voice was its firm mezzo self, though she kept her eyes to the road. “I said no, whoever he is, and she said he was probably coming with the Watsons, then. Who knew Holmes was such a party-thrower?” 

Both were wise enough to keep the question rhetorical as they processioned behind the yellow car and around Corncrack Cottage. The cottage was an exact fac simile of his mam-and-da’s, minus the Watchet coast at the end of the road, and Lestrade knew where the back door led to even before he smelled the warm biscuity air. Knew, too, who he'd find in the kitchen, manning the old-fashioned Aga.

* * *

 

“Yoo-hoo!” A delighted Mrs Hudson bussed a kiss on his cheek. “Look at you, so handsome in that heather grey suit, isn’t he just, Molly? Told you  you were a heather man. Speaking of which - how are we for herb, dear?”

For one startled pulse, Lestrade thought she was asking him. Then the outside door was pushed open once more and another woman entered, larger, white-haired, with very familiar blue eyes. She walked straight to him while speaking - not over her shoulder, her head dismissively at odds with her outstretched hand, and he liked her at once for this - to Mrs Hudson. 

“Thyme and rosemary and some _very_ ragged sage. And who might you be, my dear man?”

“Greg Les…”

“Oh, you’re that one friend of Sherlock’s.” The phrasing was weird but not unwelcome. “Good to have you here. My husband was to answer the door, only he’s a bit busy now taking it off.” She turned to Molly, patting her elbow with the hand that didn’t hold the last pick of the herb garden. “I’d better go and help him. We’re in a family pickle - and I never thought the day would come when I’d say this, but it’s not Sherlock.”

“It’s Mycroft,” came from Mrs Hudson. “Somebody’s sent him an anonymous piano.”

“A _large-sized_ anonymous piano,” Mrs Holmes specified.

“A large-sized, square, anonymous pianoforte.” Mrs Hudson would not be outbid.

“And why anybody thought it would fit better here than in Mikey’s large-sized London house is beyond me.” Mrs Holmes scored the debate triumphantly, if tartly. “Do make yourselves at home, dears. Yours rooms are upstairs, just open any door you like, except - oh, you’ll spot the boys’ quarters easily enough. We once thought we’d go guest house, Bowie and I, only -”

A crash was heard at a distance, followed by a belated “I say, careful!”.

“Oh good, he’s found those hinges.” And Mrs Holmes was off, beaming sternly at her invisible husband.

“I’d better lend a hand,” said Mrs Hudson, adding a cryptic “Can’t be worse than the elephant.”

And so they were left care of the kitchen, Molly and he, with its abundance of food. It kindled a dormant gene in Lestrade, man’s neandertal need for a cave and its fire, making him reluctant to leave this homey place for the loneliness of a guest room. He glanced at Molly and saw her colour up like an apple. Something complicated here - embarrassment - something to do with the whole Dimmock-Donovan-ditch-for-ditch caboodle. Well, he didn’t blame her for any of it, and the sooner he made that clear, the better 

“Here,” he said, shrugging off the heather jacket prior to unbuttoning his shirt cuffs and rolling up his sleeves. Looking around, he spotted what must be Mrs Holmes’s apron, a no-nonsense affair of blue cotton draped over a chair.  “Let’s get the Christmas dinner fit an’ready for them, shall we? You shred the herbs, I’ll check that gravy here - very _aggravating_ , gravy can be when it runs over the top.”

He heard the relief in Molly’s laughter and chuckled, turning so she could tie the apron strings for him. Shortest way from A to B, a pun, whether you had to sock a punch or defuse a situation. And the worst always worked best.  

“I’m glad it’s you they asked,” Molly said impulsively. “For the task force, I mean.” 

 _They_? _Task force_? And yet Lestrade thought he knew - partly - what she had in mind.

He shrugged. “Couldn’t ask anyone else, could they? Gregson’s on sick leave and Dimmock’s gone and volunteered for that exchange program in Norfolk. Arse-side of nowhere, I’m told, so I’ve no idea when whe’ll see him again.” He knew the relief was shared, and he was glad when she looked at him for good, her face bright with unspoken thanks.

They soon had the gravy under arrest and were turning their attention to the blackberry pudding when the kitchen door trembled again. Lestrade went to open it, letting in a gust of cold air and the new arrivals.

“Hullo! Long time no see.” Mary kissed his cheek, laughing, her breath quick with excitement. “Oh, but it feels good to be here again. Molly, sweets, how are you? We’ve brought the Wild Child of espionage. ”

“Seb, this is -” But John’s introduction was left to peter in the air as the man in the Aran sweater took two steps into the room, turned the fire off under the escalating gravy, scooped up the lid, slapped it down the pan, wheeled round, waved to Molly and brought his hand round to clasp Lestrade’s as a finish to his arabesque of motion. He’d known exactly where to find the lid, Lestrade saw, though he’d been only an instant in the room.

“Mr Holmes. Pleasure,” the man said. He was all cream and tenor and appeared to have yellow eyes. “I’m an _extreme_ admirer of Sherlock, can’t tell you how chuffed I was at the prospect of meeting his parents. Sherlock never told me his father was such a chef!”

“Chief, more like. And he’s not my son.” Lestrade put some iron into his own grip.

“This is Detective Inspector Lestrade.” Blast John, you’d think ten years in the Army would have taught him when to pull an emergency poker face. Instead, the man was giggling. “Hehehe-he’s known Sherlock longer than any of us.”

“My mistake. But one easy to forgive, I’m sure” Moran gave everyone in his orbit a frank smile. He also had impeccable teeth. “Not the father, the _mentor_. Sherlock is lucky to have someone like you watching over him.”

“I keep an eye on people. Yeah.” Lestrade hoped he’d made his message simple.

This prompted Mary to ask if he’d seen their hosts, which led to John asking about the big black van and Molly saying it was here on account of Mycroft having received an anon Hahn.

“Not a Hahn, a Yamaha.” Sherlock had just made his entrance stage left, clad in pale grey jeans and a shirt that matched the Aran for whiteness. He stopped to review his audience and when he caught sight of Lestrade, bare-armed in his mother’s apron, his face relaxed. It no longer shone with oblique meaning, but with something purer and - younger, yeah.   _He’s actually happy you’re here_ , John had once told Lestrade, back when they had all needed a translator for Sherlock’s emotional gamuts. Now Lestrade could read for himself. Read _You’ve come!_  in that off-guard smile, a moment before naughtiness covered it again and Sherlock turned to Moran. “A _Yamaha_ , Seb.”

“Tell me more.” And the man, mole, Mycroft’s man, whatever he was, had shimmied his way to Sherlock and secured a chair next to him before Greg could object to this seating plan. “Give me a show, Sherlock Holmes, and let whoever will listen to the Queen’s speech.”

“Yes!” Mrs Holmes’s voice boomed in appraisal over a series of agitated yips. She was carrying a small dachshund who howled mournfully at the sight of the Christmas dinner, and was followed by her husband and elder son, Mrs Hudson forming the rear of the procession. “That very good-looking young man, whoever he is - Seb, then - is perfectly right. All I said was, it's very generous from Her and She's perfectly free to encourage your musical skills as I did thirty-five years ago, I just wish She’d consulted _me_ first.”

Mr Holmes tried to make a bigger on the inside joke. It sank into the general heat of debate.

“I am as surprised as you are, Mummie.” But Lestrade could see that Mycroft Holmes was smiling.

“Wait, you mean it hasn’t been vetted by your services?” Captain Watson was rising to the situation.  “Everyone, stand up again. Given the reason why we’re all here…”

“Oh, we don’t say grace in this house,” Mr Holmes confided to the air.

“The Queen? Please.” Sherlock’s tones dripped with disdain. He pushed one elbow across the tabletop and leaned on it, carving a secretive niche for Moran and himself as he released his next clue.  “Yamaha is a Korean brand.”

“But no one said Jim was in Korea.” When Molly’s brave attempt at resurfacing in the general talk failed, she added, “Celery stick, anyone?”

The dachshund accepted one and inspected it carefully before it fled under the table, where Mrs Hudson pursued it with a piece of gammon. More and sharper cries were heard. Apparently, the dachshund had strong views on saturated fat.

“Let's just hope Sherlock _didn't_ remember to bring his violin.” Mrs Holmes turned to Mary, her table neighbour. “We had them practice a duet when Sherlock was six. Never again. It’s a miracle any of us survived _Twinkle Twinkle Little Star_.”

“You summoned me here to battle Moriarty? And never told me a word about it?” Lestrade roared.

Mr Holmes tapped his knife to his glass, pushed his chair back and rose, his bow-tie already capsized but his face radiant with good will. “It is my great honour and pleasure,” he began across the various glares, gripes, mutters of bomb squads and undercover yapping, “to preside yet another Christmas dinner in our family…”


	6. Chapter 6

Tokay, eh? Not his tipple, but Lestrade felt in a mood to toast the roast pork it came with. Or the baby Jesus, who had outdone himself and passed his Miracle Badge test with flying colours. For the lunch was proving a roaring success, after all. That is, everyone was still trying to bugger everyone else’s decibels, but with that slippery good humour which meant that no one was paying any real attention to what anyone said.

 

Except...

 

He scowled at Moran’s sleek head, shot with russet lights under the bright ceiling lamp as he leant sideways into Sherlock’s table space, adding plain sight to flirtation. And worse, because Lestrade could guess how Moran’s whisper was calling out the leanest, meanest fibre in Sherlock. Was, in fact, coaxing Sherlock to spin a bastard tale about his own brother, incidentally Moran’s boss and second-degree host, _right under his parents’ roof_.

 

And what a tale. Of romance, high treason and a piano most foul.

 

“…wanted to know a little more, and this tells me quite enough. I may not have convinced you…”

 

“Oh, but you have! Swept me off my feet and judgement with your impeccable reasoning. Your suspicion is my command.”

 

“The arrival of the pianoforte is decisive.” Sherlock harpooned his roast pork with his fork, eyes gleaming.

 

“Quite so. Piano – hush-hush. Korean piano – hush-hush, wink-wink. Oversized Korean piano – our dangerous liaison will dash all obstacles and blow up every door between us until we make music out of chaos. Typical Dixon. He’d wear that white shirt unbuttoned all the way down to his nipples if he could, the old romantic.”

 

“Then my brother _did_ extrade him!” Sherlock’s voice dropped to a gleeful hush, not that he was a match against years of picking out Gary Lineker’s voice among the rattle and clatter of a Friday pub night. “He rules every high-security cell, every control room in England. Why, he once let Moriarty himself –”

 

“But the scandal…”

 

“Can be avoided if he puts up a smoke screen. A sensationalist campaign to distract MI6 and blot out his – little indiscretion. Convenient, isn’t it, that Moriarty should be resurrected just when …”

 

But Lestrade had heard enough. Heard the petty cruelty in Sherlock’s voice and flinched alert, even though it was not directed against him but the man whose last smoke-screen operation had been to wrench his baby brother from Moriarty’s clutches. This made Sherlock’s mad scenario about Mycroft’s amours even more shocking, and decisively unworthy of Moran’s flippant praise. And it didn’t speak in Moran’s favour that he encouraged his new friend in this crude, childish slander, buttering up Sherlock’s arrogance with every glib word. Whatever Moran’s game was, love was out. Because a true lover would have shut Sherlock up, using whatever means at his disposal, only so he could rekindle the good in Sherlock – steer him with a firm, loving hand, back to the better man Sherlock had grown to be, no matter how many times he slipped.

 

But that Moran bloke only treated Sherlock cheap. Only let him make a fool of himself by spewing what in Lestrade’s opinion was plain and utter…

 

“Comiiing!” Mrs Hudson trilled, startling him as she levitated the gravy pan over his shoulder. He waited until she had spooned a dollop onto his plate, then pinned his stare to Sherlock and said it again. Louder. “APPLESAUCE. Ow!”

 

Under the table, his trouser leg was being tugged by an anxious paw, and a rather clawy one.

 

“Ow, ow,” the dachshund echoed reproachfully.

 

“Oh, don’t mind Mr Wody,” came from Mrs Holmes. “Like all dachshunds, he has a very sensitive stomach and tends to get fussy on behalf of everyone’s health.” She lifted a corner of the tablecloth and bent down. “Hush, pet. No butter, no grease and half the sugar is really Aspartame. The detective inspector’s stomach couldn’t be in safer hands.”

 

“Have you had him long?” Mary, tactfully bypassing the mixed metaphor. “I don’t remember him attending Christmas dinner last year.”

 

“Do you know,” Mr Holmes said, beaming, “I actually remember very little about that dinner myself. Most strange.”

 

“Hush, pet,” came mechanically from Mrs Holmes. “No, Mycroft brought him yesterday as a gift. Said it might be a good idea to have him around every time we invited Sherlock over for munchies. _And_ drinkies.” Mrs Holmes’s eyes rested briefly on her second-born. “We’re getting along very well indeed, aren’t we, Mr Wody?”

 

“The name of this animal,” Mycroft said in his usual starch-and-sugar tones, “is Sir Pelham Grenville Wodehouse. Though he’ll probably be known as “Wo” or “W” by the end of his happy stay in this household.”

* * *

 

 

Mr Wody’s vigilance lasted through pudding and coffee, which they took in the living-room. This was a complicated affair, given that a third of the room was now occupied by the pianoforte – a square, stocky, black monolith that looked as if it had been literally delivered by the big black van. It held pride of place at the centre, and they had to stand in a circle around it while Mycroft sat on the little velvet-lined stool, his dignity unruffled. Might as well be playing ring-a-ring-a-roses, Lestrade reflected, though he had been told during lunch that his hosts were more into line-dancing.

 

He sipped his coffee and watched Moran. Once again Moran had positioned himself next to one Holmes, but was looking intently at the other, deaf to Sherlock’s request for more coffee and not-Aspartame. When asked testily what the matter was, he started, whispered something and crossed the room quickly to place himself before Mycroft. Lestrade crossed over to Sherlock.

 

“What’s going on here?” he asked, keeping his voice neutral.

 

“Nothing.” Sherlock turned limpid blue eyes to him.

 

“Sherlock. There’s a reason your brother asked us all to come over. It’s serious stuff, stuff that could endanger a good many people, and if you two think…”

 

“ _I_ asked you here.” Limpid blue no longer limpid. Quickly morphing into electric blue, if anything. “And we’re only checking his tie for evidence!”

 

“ _What?_ ” Lestrade tried to remember the tie. One of those nondescript luxury items, with a tiny-tiny pattern of, erm. Bits of white. And bits of red. He hated ties too much to keep up with Mycroft Holmes’s fashionista trends.

 

“Christian Dior’s ‘Inner Harmony’ pattern,” Sherlock fast-tracked. “Based upon the Eastern symbol for the union of opposites, the taegeuk, made of two semicircles fused together. Yin and yang, white and red, ice and fire, intellect and energy, peace and war, lover and beloved...”

 

“Ssssh!” Lestrade gazed uneasily in Mycroft’s direction. But Moran was standing in front of his prey, his tall frame screening both men’s faces from notice. When he turned away and began to retrace his steps, Lestrade bunched his shoulders and stood his ground, a clear challenge for Moran’s _spazio vitale_ near Sherlock. Moran stopped midway and smiled agreeably. When he showed no sign of moving on, the dachshund trotted up to him and tangled itself around his left ankle, where it promptly fell asleep.

 

 _Good boy_ , Lestrade praised him mentally. Then shifted closer to Sherlock. _Two can be vigilant_.

 

“Well? Is it, or isn’t it, a love code?” Sherlock asked impatiently.

 

“Oh, it is. Definitely a love code.” The amber in Moran’s eyes shone all but phosphorescent in their angle of shadows. “I haven’t the slightest doubt now.”

 

“Definite bollocks,” Lestrade told Mr Wody.

 

“And it features on the national flag of Korea!”

 

“South Korea,” said Moran, looking away with charming delicacy.

 

“South Korea,” Lestrade repeated stoutly. He made a mental note of it for his next crossword.

 

Sherlock was opening his mouth, probably to tell them that Christian Dior could hardly afford to have the North Korean flag on his winter collection, when Mrs Holmes announced that the living-room was all theirs. Mr Holmes added that he would now see to the washing-up, which was part of his supervisor’s duties, and Mrs Hudson said that “Meggie and I”, not being ones for naps, were going for a nice, bracing – a side peep at the snoring dog – W-A-L-K in the S-N-O-W.

 

“A wholesome pastime.” And Mycroft waved the parental trio on from his piano. “Don’t worry about our guests, Mummy, I have plenty here to keep them entertained.”

 

Mrs Hudson tipped him a coy pout. “But I wanted to hear the concert!”

 

“Not a concert, no.” Mycroft’s smile was its usual bland self. “We’re going to play a game of alphabets.”

 

“Ooooh, scrabble! I’ve always liked a nice board game. Now, make sure Sherlock plays nice and...” And Mrs Hudson, never one to share Hamlet’s glum resignation in matters of ‘words, words, words’, would certainly have stayed on if Mrs Holmes had not come back with their coats. She was bundled and carried off under her friend’s arm, chirping happily as she went out “Just remember X _doesn’t_ mark the spot, Sherlock!”

 

“John. Molly.” Mycroft bent to retrieve a small case propped against his feet. He opened it and pulled out his laptop before settling it on the glossy hard shell of the piano. “Can I trouble you to close the curtains?”

 

The bubble of excitement grew in the pit of Lestrade’s chest. Now he could feel a change in the air. It turned warmer and darker as the penumbra grew thicker, relieved only by the red-rose glow from the wood stove, one parchment lampshade in a corner and the ubiquitous Christmas lights. Then Mycroft fiddled with his laptop and a laser-beam flashed across the room, hitting the white chimney lintel where it bloomed into a luminous patch.

 

“Oooh!” Mary sounded envious. “Someone’s been a _very_ good boy all this year.”

 

“Ladies. Gentlemen.” Mycroft craned his neck in slow motion to peer at them in turn, looking for all the world like one of his own CCTV cameras. Even Sherlock was silenced. “I need not tell you that the pictures you’re about to see are stamped with the highest level of secrecy. Only a handful of people know about them. No one so far knows what to do with them. If we choose to see them as evidence that James Moriarty is still alive and active, and if we ourselves act in consequence, then we may have to face the music” – a few loud twangs, as if Mycroft had struck the keys at random – “alone. As always with that psychotic little twerp.”

 

“But it is the courage to continue that counts.”

 

“And, given his history with each of you here, there’s no saying what danger awaits us.”

 

“If you are going through Hell, keep going.”

 

“If this is him, then he’s leading the game. His murders, his turf. His call. He’s giving us little to no leverage.”

 

“Never, never, never give in!”

 

“Yes, _thank_ you, Mr Churchill.” But the crisp edge was softened in Mycroft’s voice, as if Moran’s jibes had actually loosened some of his internal tension. “And now, I’m afraid our holiday is over. Ah, well. After all, the Almighty took the first of all Sundays off when creating the world, and look where that left the world. My friends – the first picture.”

 

The first picture was greeted by a varied assortment of gasps, groans and one baffled woof as Moran tried to take a step forward.

 

“He’s back into business and…into business cards?” John’s disbelief was as clear-cut as as the flowery design script on the card promoting one Father Jim, expert in Marriage Counselling.

 

“I really, really wish he hadn’t gone for pink.” Molly sounded upset. “Or that…what’s that stick-insect thing in the logo? It looks a bit, well, nasty.”

 

“A praying mantis, Miss Hooper.”

 

“That’s horrible!”

 

“No, that’s my Jim!” Trust Moran to sound elated. “What did I tell you about the animal touch? James Moriarty to a T.”

 

“And where did you get this, Mycroft?” Sherlock hadn’t gasped, hadn’t gawked; was careful to keep up his sceptic’s posture, though Lestrade could feel his long form stiffening at his side. He leant a bit more into the shadowy space between them.

 

“It was recovered at Doctor Manders’s home by one of my men, when the flat was searched after the good doctor confessed to the murder of his wife." Mycroft bypassed Lestrade’s confused ‘But…’ with a flourish of hand. “Yes, Detective Inspector, I’m aware that your forensic team went through the place with a fine-tooth comb and sealed the door in four different places after they’d wiped their feet on the mat. Nonetheless, this was in Manders’s rooms, just as that was retrieved from Helen Armitage, the chief suspect in the Roylott case."

 

He pressed a touch and a new card appeared. It now advertised the services of one Daddy-Long-Arm, though the particulars – address, phone number, website – were identical. Lestrade read the new slogan – _Daddy delivers dead on time!_ – and crossed his arms over his chest, sick at heart.

 

“Oh, this is fun! Much more than freezing my unmentionables in the Thar desert to scrape intelligence.” Was that…? Yeah, the loud hollow clap must be Moran’s hands, cheering noisily. _Selfish sod_ , Lestrade thought, his lips pinched tight with distaste as he glared at the Aran sweater whitening the gloom. _Only thinks of his own pleasure. Not of the people, the human casualties, two down already, how many more_...

 

With a jolt, he came back to the moment and the long finger prodding his ribs. Sherlock too was leaning sideways . “Why are you moping?” he asked, loud enough to attract John’s attention. “Your face is all scrunched up and you haven’t said a word yet.”

 

For some reason this infuriated Lestrade even more. “Oh? Well, perhaps not all of us like to show off our voices, Sherlock. Carry on, Mr Holmes,” he added, raising his. “ _I_ ’m with you.”

 

“Thank you.” If Mycroft was surprised by this vote of confidence, he didn’t let it on. Not so Sherlock, judging from the audible hiss at Lestrade’s side. Lestrade tried to lean a bit more to reassure him that he could be with several people, even if his pillar-of-strength attitude was veering more and more into the Tower of Pisa.

 

“Now, it seems that these cards had been slipped to their recipients as a means of arranging an interview between…let’s call this person M, since we have no evidence so far as to his or her identity, and M’s potential clients.”

 

“But not at the address on the cards,” Mary quickly interposed. “That would be a decoy. Did you have it checked?”

 

“Obviously.” Mycroft turned to face her, and Lestrade, once again, was struck by the absolutism in that strong nose, the saving grace of features which, in its absence, would have toted up to a caricature of balding Englishness. “The address does exist, but is currently held by the Convent of Perpetual Adoration of the Precious Blood.”

 

“Fuck. Sorry, but if it’s not him, then he’s found a bloody good stand-in.”

 

“Fuck indeed, Captain Watson. Now, it seems that M, whoever he is, is a riddler as well as a jokester. Both cards contained a puzzle on their verso, indicating the place of rendez-vous. In both cases, the code was easy to crack and the place, inevitably, was empty when we visited it – a one-time location. We’ve tried to...coax more information” – Mycroft gave a dignified cough – “from Dr Manders and Mrs Armitage, with little results so far. Mrs Armitage won’t say a word and Dr Manders, as Lestrade here will confirm, has been all but catatonic since his arrest.”

 

Lestrade nodded. He’d found it difficult to believe, upon first meeting Manders, that the creature before him had once committed the perfect crime using only a syringe and a dead chicken. In the interview cell, he had found a white-faced, quivering mess of a man, scared out of his wits and incapable of answering even the simplest question. Then Manders and the Manders case had been taken out of his hands – wheels within wheels, Lestrade’s Super had told him (the Super had discovered long ago that metaphor would do nicely when he himself  had no clear answer to give) – and that had been that.

 

“It’s a good thing, then, that my best man – the agent I’ve mentioned before…”

 

“Your _best_ man?” Moran’s voice was no longer jaunty. One down, Lestrade thought, and took a mental bow to Mycroft.

 

“My best man at home. Not counting the detective inspector, of course.”

 

“Of course,” Lestrade echoed, bearing stoically with Sherlock's renewed pecking.

 

“...procured us a third card. He was one of a small number I’d already instructed to pass themselves off as, well. Let us say, as people looking for a helping hand in the fine art of murder. My man – let us call him M2 – received his card this very morning, photographed it and sent it to me two hours ago. Unfortunately, that was when Father Christmas was...creating a diversion in this house” – Mycroft’s fingers touched the piano keys with surprising gentleness – “and I have barely had the time to glance at it. Here it is.”

 

The next picture was double, the recto and verso of the small card. It had a soberer design than the previous one, white on black, with only a Gothic M standing out in the center. This time, the advertising slogan was “Dirty deeds done dirt cheap.” It rang a muffled bell in Lestrade’s memory, chimed from long-ago, half-forgotten years, and he strained to pursue it.

 

But it was the other side, the dark side of the enigma, which drew everyone else’s eyes. The puzzle on the verso, lined out in a stuttering, insane string of letters:

 

**TGTGUAGTGGAAATAAAA**

**You have thirty-six hours.**

 

 


	7. Chapter 7

“Not a skip code,” Mary said, frowning down at her iPad. Phones had been turned to writing apps, paper and stumps of pencil fished out of drawers: now Mycroft’s finest were rapidly forming words for one another. Or trying. “Seb?”

 

“Not a Beale code either. Too repetitive. An anagram, perhaps? Scramble ’em up, get a bright new word. Like, oh, I don’t know.” Moran darted a sly look in Sherlock’s direction. “D-I-X-O-N?”

 

Sherlock rolled his eyes in faux-disapproval at the barb, but Lestrade had caught the glint in his eye.

 

“Or plain D-I-C-K,” he butted in, bending to stroke a suspicious Mr Wody’s ears. Christ, but he hated bullies of all stripes. And yeah, Mycroft Holmes was a dangerous man – a man of twists and turns, and not Lestrade's idea of a likeable man. But right now he was a man trying to do his job, and that was enough for Greg to go with.

 

“Sherlock, let’s get crackin’. Yeah, pun intended. Any idea?”

 

“One.” But the tight, resolute voice came from Molly’s corner. “It has to be the genetic code, surely? I mean, Jim being a scientist and all. Not that it’s very difficult to figure it out, not with Wikipedia and _QI_ and all that and, oh, my dad used coloured Smarties when I was a child. And he always let me eat them after, lovely man. I mean.”

 

“Molly.” Like the wise old men of yore, Lestrade usually knew when he knew nothing. “ _I_ have no idea what you mean.”

 

“Miss Hooper is refering us to the code used by biochemists to read the protein translation process, Inspector.” If Mycroft had been ruffled by Moran’s stupid quip, there was nothing to show for it. In fact, unless Lestrade’s eyes were very much mistaken, Mycroft was…smiling. A faint smile, barely qualifying as a chink in the armour, but a smile. “Operating on a three-letter basis, since each codon, or sequence, is really a nucleotide triplet. And since each codon is also associated to a letter, Miss Hooper thinks they might be the key here.”

 

Lestrade processed this, scratching the side of his head with his pencil. As a result, he used it to space out the letters in groups of three.

 

**TGG-GUA-GTG-GAA-ATA-AAA**

 

Molly, who had done the same, let out a soft sigh. _What?_ and _Where?_ and _Woof?_ rang out excitedly from various angles.

 

“Wrong,” Sherlock chimed in, late as usual.

 

“Well, TGG would be Cysteine and GUA Valine, I reckon.” Molly sounded unsure. “C and V, then. But GTG is another codon for Valine. And then there’s Glutamic Acid, Ileusine and Lysine. C-V-V-E-I-L. “Veil” because we don’t know who is hiding under the mask? But what’s C-V for?”

 

“ _Begorrah_ , that’s a start. And if you scramble ’em up, which I’m sure our Molly has already done in her head, what do you get? E-V-I-L. His curriculum vitae!”

 

“That’s absurd!” Sherlock had both hands in his already much disturbed hair and was apparently trying to lift himself up by sheer force of irritation.  “And GUA is the _RNA_ codon coding for valine, not DNA. Why would anyone mix it with a thymine-containing sequence? Not Moriarty. No self-respecting biochemist ever would!”

 

“...Don’t ask me,” John told his wife drily. “I’m a doctor, not a self-respecting psychopath.”

 

“Then we need to probe the code again. Focus, Sherlock!”

 

“Won’t.” Sherlock glared at his brother. “Not for some stupid riddle you probably rigged up your…”

 

The explosion took everyone by surprise. It swooped and crashed around them, a loud vertigo of notes whirled out in dizzying, deadly accuracy until Mycroft brought the _glissando_ to a sharp bend and a derisive tune. Lestrade thought he recognised _Twinkle Twinkle Little Star_.

 

“If anything, the _message_ is rigged.” Mycroft gave the piano a rewarding pat and lifted his gaze to Sherlock again. “Tricked. Something’s missing, some ultimate clue. Now, where could it be, do you think?”

 

Sherlock ignored the child-friendly question. Lestrade didn’t.

 

“On the rest of the card, obviously. For us to pick up and use as a key. Wait! That M...”

 

“Hiding an all-important letter in plain view? No, Greg. That would be a little crude, even if M knew about my brother’s fondness for Edgar Allan Poe. But if we look further...”

 

“The motto!” Mary was leaning forward on her chair. “It gets new with every card – the name and slogan, so we think of them as an item. But what if the slogan alone is meaningful? _Dirty deeds done cheap_. That’s...”

 

“AC/DC!” John struck his fist into his open palm, a slightly premature V-sign.

 

“AC/DC!” Molly piped up. “Of _course_!”

 

“AC/DC!” Moran threw his head back on a peal of laughter. “Oh, Jimmy, Jimmy. Dead or alive, never change!”

 

“A what?” And Sherlock restored the room to baffled silence. Which broke again in everyone’s jumbled attempts to explain Australian hard rock to him, dotted with Mr Wody’s general appeal to keep calm, check their blood pressure and ask for a fresh bowl of water.

 

“Here. Have a picture,” Mycroft offered in sugar-coated tones.

 

Immediately, the image on the chimney front became a four-letter sign, still black on white, still jaggedly Gothic. Lestrade stared at it, swirled by remembrances of things and concerts past. He had taken his wife to one of these when she was still his girl, and spent it fooling around with her in their back row, then on the exposed fire escape in the interval. Had inhaled the faint smell of smoke clinging to her hair before he touched her secret hair and more, under the cold winds which had dried his fingers and the tender inside of her thighs too quickly, leaving him with only the pungent-sweet scent of her. Was he…

 

“Almost too many letters,” Moran was saying, his voice a faraway drawl. “Unless the slash is a clue, too? Sir?”

 

… glad that Sherlock had been spared his bittersweet, banal past? Or sorry, if it meant that…

 

“Molly, suppose you tag AC in at the start of the chain and DC at the end, can you split it differently? No, wait. Drat. You couldn’t match them again in three and there’d be one left out, right?”

 

…Sherlock didn’t know the good that hangs about sweet and banal, and touching and being touched when you’re both into it, willing against the Manchester cold. That he was still the odd man out, his body vulnerable only to whatever made his mind solider. Even now, even after Greg had held him in his arms on his return night and felt him wince, his marble-and-nerve charisma chipped and bruised and made tender by too much absence, something you’d have to be blind not to...

 

“I’m sorry, has anyone seen my glasses?” The door to the corridor shook, then squeaked open, ushering Mr Holmes in. He still had a cotton tea towel pinned to his maroon suit and was wiping his hands on it.  “I thought I’d try a little crossword after my nap. Is the night come already?”

 

“Not _now_ , Father.”

 

“Well, it’s frightfully dark in here.” Mr Holmes blinked into the room with owlish innocence. “Oh, slides. Are you playing _QI_ then? Which of you is Stephen Fry?”

 

“Father!” A despairing Mycroft fumbled with his laptop.

 

But it was too late: Mr Holmes had already taken that closer step to the chimney. “ACID?!” The benevolence faltered; grabbed for a sterner note as their host turned his head one way and another, peering into the chiaroscuro. “Sherlock, are you by any chance...”

 

“Oh. Ooooooh!”

 

And even Moran started as Sherlock launched himself out of his sulking-place. He clasped his father’s shoulders and, to a chorus of wild humming, placed a kiss on the old man’s forehead. Then his glasses, which had been hanging on a cord round Mr Holmes’s neck and under the makeshift apron. Before the recipient of these attentions could thank him, Sherlock had turned him round, toddled him out of the room, and was closing the door behind Mr Wody who, overwhelmed by the happy scene, was off for a nap of his own.

 

“ACID for the amino acids!” Sherlock yelled. “They’re the key to the protein coding and there are twenty of them, well, twenty-two if you make room for pyrrolysine and selenocysteine. And they’re all represented by a single letter. Which leaves us with C, so C is our missing link. Extra letter. One way or another, C has to be incorporated to the chain. So many probabilities, but… I think...  ” And Sherlock, miracle of miracles, shut up of his own will. Only his lips went on moving silently, faster and faster as his brain geared up for the enigma.

 

Every friggin’ time, Lestrade thought for himself. Every time he knew what to expect when Sherlock’s pale face lit up from the inside, just like this, flushed and strained under Sherlock’s effort in driving his mind bang into its brilliant climax. And every time the erotic vision clenched something in Lestrade’s chest that couldn’t find release for itself, just like now. He looked on, entranced.

 

“Sherlock!” Mary, it seemed, was more impervious. “You may be a genius, but _I_ ’m in possession of a CIA-issued phone. With enough apps and calculators to make a camel salivate. Here, look. There’s only one chain that makes sense if you add C to the mix, and it’s this.”

 

John and Lestrade both craned their necks somewhat painfully before Lestrade realized that Mycroft had changed the picture on the chimney breast. It now read

 

**TGC-CGC-UAG-TGG-AAC-ATC-AAC-AAC**

 

“Cysteine-Arginine-Pyrrolysine-Tryptophan-Asparagine-Isoleucine-Asparagine-Asparagine,” Sherlock rattled off at his customary lightspeed.

 

“Gesundheit,” Greg said, his moment passed. “Now in words of one letter, please.”

 

“C-R-O-W-N-I-N-N,” Molly, Mary and Sherlock all intoned together. “Crown Inn,” Molly added in case the audience needed further enlightenment.

 

“Well, isn’t that progress.” Moran stretched his arms above his head, his Aran sweater gleaming white in the darkened room. “It’s been a while since I’ve been in Queen Liz’s land, but last time I looked there was a Crown Inn about _everywhere_. You Brits like to make a point.”

 

But Mycroft sat silent.

 

“You know,” Moran said, straightening up. The lurker was gone; the hunter back in place, his gaze a sharper and more avid yellow. It turned to Sherlock, stiffening at Lestrade’s side. “You too.”

 

“There is in England,” Mycroft said slowly, “a number of empty houses that cannot be taken down because their very age makes them national bounty, but are too lonely to be an economic asset. Sometimes they are trespassed, vandalized; sometimes they are shelters to the squirrels and the homeless; sometimes they reap their fifteen minutes of glory when a camera crew spots them. Or a murderer does. The Crown Inn was a fine and strapping hostel in its Regency day, and it lies two miles from this house. I think you can open the curtains again, John.”

 

It was almost a shock to see again out of the cottage window, as if the room had taken on another dimension with the view and its perspective of Surrey fields and shadowy Surrey hillsides. The light was no longer rainy but the pure deep blue of early winter evening.

 

“The Crown Inn,” Sherlock repeated. He was no longer a fixed feature; he was pacing to and fro and round the bulky piano with electric purpose. “Unreliable floors, shaky bannisters, one long and very dark passage. I used to go there at night to play with....” He left the sentence hanging. Not Mycroft, Lestrade guessed from their host’s resigned shake of the head.

 

“And now you’re all grown-up and in a dancing mood. Well, you’ll have to wait, Sherlock. The rendez-vous is for tomorrow midnight, which means that for the next twenty-hours or so you will have to abstain from the...felicities of rapid motion.” Mycroft frowned at his brother’s fast-retreating back. “By which I mean ‘stay put’, and _mean_ it.”

 

“My turf, my challenge.”

 

“My trap, my man.” Mycroft had barely raised his voice. “You will either let me conduct this operation or do without dancing entirely, Sherlock.”

 

“I long to dance,” Moran said suddenly. Fiercely. “Come and scheme with me, Sherlock. Let’s make it a ball to remember, shall we?”

 

The light flared in Sherlock’s  eyes, by now the genuine Bunsen-burner blue. “Gladly.”

 

“Neither of you will take a step into this house before I’ve had a good look at it.” John caught Sherlock’s arm on his third twirl about and held fast. “Including the long and very dark passage. In fact, starting with the long passage. Ever had a case where someone nearly caught his death in a dark and stormy corridor? Because I have.”

 

“Oh, you big fusspot,” came from Mary.

 

Lestrade heard them, though his mind was lingering on the countryside, now a blue landscape with figures as Mrs Holmes and Mrs Hudson appeared, a valiant twosome treading the front lane arm in arm. They saw him and waved, and he pushed up the window sash to wave back at the ladies. Almost at once a thought rose in him, darkening the scene again.

 

“Your turf,” he said, and it didn’t matter which Holmes he was parrotting. “It’s not just Sherlock’s old playground, is it? Because it’s close. Two miles is so close to – here, this, your family....” Holmeshire, Donovan had all but called it in a road trip that already felt like the far end of yesterday. And now M the Murderer was calling on it. Making it _his_ turf, his battlefield.

 

Mycroft met him eye to eye, his face expressionless. “They’ve never come to harm before.”

 

“But you have nobody watching over it. This house.”

 

“I have a few people – at a distance. It’s complicated, Greg. Those to whom I answer… they do not exactly trust me on the subject of Moriarty’s return. They have seen that very bizarre message, we all have, but most of them think I have rigged it up myself. To save a criminal, one very near and very dear to me, from a long prison term.” Mycroft’s eyes never were still on him, but Lestrade heard Sherlock’s sharp intake of breath in his back. He waited for Sherlock’s whoop of glee to follow, but nothing came.

 

Only the new footsteps, as the main door shut with a muffled click, and Mrs Holmes’s light-hearted voice. “Why, Martha, it’s just the part for you. It’s got oomph. And did I tell you about Act Four, when the singing nuns crash the thugs’ casino? I thought you and I could ask Bowie to drive us to Highbury tomorrow, have a flutter ourselves... No, dear, it’s actually called method acting.”

 

“Then I’ll pitch in.” The decision had been taken without a second thought, while Lestrade was still leaning forward to speak, both elbows on his knees. “Men, cars, anything you need. I can round ’em up, even a chopper or two if I must - ask your brother. _I_ believe you, Mycroft.” He did. And he would put his job on line - again -  before he let any devil rip Sherlock’s landlady of a life with colours, take the oomph and song out of Sherlock’s mother. He felt Moran’s gaze on the back of his neck and shrugged, the need to protect burning as fiercely raw as the Irishman’s craving to fight.

 

This, sadly, was when his shoulder was knocked out of line, spoiling his fierce-and-raw.  For Sherlock was stomping past him, his long face warped in a scowl that pushed up his underlip and left him slightly cross-eyed as he glared at Lestrade. Didn’t take kindly to others taking centerstage, Lestrade remembered too late. He said ‘Sunshine’ and was met with a hiss as Sherlock  crossed to the door on very stiff lean legs and slammed it on his way out.

 

Rather typically, things fell apart in his wake. John ran after Sherlock. Mary, blowing them a kiss, sauntered after John. Mycroft stayed where he was, but only to tuck his chin slightly in ( _hunching_ , Lestrade suspected, was for the commoners) over his piano pressie and start playing again.

 

What he played was very different from his previous blitz tactics. It was slow, then not so slow, making loops of sound that went on and forward and crisscross, never one note louder than the next. It was like rain, cooling the chafed air of the room, and like the rain it overpowered you from every angle. Mycroft’s piano spoke, but what it said kept shapeshifting, though Lestrade thought he could spot a plea, tucked into a command, nursing a promise that was all grace and steel. It stopped only to begin again, placating, offering, ordering, and it would be a day before Lestrade learnt the piece was called _The Goldberg Variations_. Right now, all he knew was that there was meaning hardcoded in the performance, and that Mycroft Holmes was one hell of a player. Not that he had much of an audience, what with...

 

He turned. Moran had crossed to where Molly was sitting, one hand held out. Lestrade saw the old deck of cards, pinched from one of Mrs Holmes’s drawers, and heard Moran ask quietly, “Sweet Molly Malone, will you play with me?” Moran, who...was hiding a deeper game, had been for a while, though Lestrade wasn’t too sure how much double-dealing it involved. There was that look again, rapt, intent, on Moran’s foxlike face as Mycroft started on another leg of the piece. But the man was too much of a professional not to notice another spying on him. His face morphed into a quick smile, flashed at Molly who smiled back, her face lit up with the blooming sweetness that was all hers, Molly’s knack for getting pleasure from any human interaction, even after all her pangs and trials of heart.

 

 _Who’s the odd man out, then?_ played in his mind, as Lestrade went to fetch his bag from the kitchen, where tea was being made, happy and glorious, to its own accompaniment of the Queen’s Speech. He walked up the stairs to select his room for the night. Mrs Holmes had said to just pick and choose, that he’d have no trouble spotting the boys’ headquarters, and Mrs Holmes was a woman of her word. Lestrade could hear Sherlock’s violin play its own loop from the other end of the corridor. On a hunch, he walked into the next empty room, dropped his bag on the bed and gave the partition a tentative knock.

 

The violin leapt to a banshee pitch, followed by Sherlock’s voice, higher and younger than Sherlock’s customary baritone. “Go _away_!”

 

“Sunshine.” It had been years since Lestrade had used the old moniker, and Sherlock had never sounded more un-sunny, but he soldiered on. “What’s fretting you?”

 

But Sherlock only played on – a faithful, if screechier version of his brother’s melody. The code was cristal clear, at least to Lestrade’s ears: somebody was unfeignedly and unequivocally fretting at the inferiority of his own playing, and was investing in vigorous practice. Lestrade shrugged and went out again.


	8. Chapter 8

He didn’t feel like tea, not much. He felt very much like a fag break, and told Mr Wody so in no uncertain terms when he found the dachsie standing guard at the kitchen door. “Leave it abroad, boy,” he concluded in his ma’s Cornish dialect, an old move he'd used in earlier days to startle Sherlock into shutting his gob. It had worked for approximately forty-five minutes, before Sherlock had cottoned on and given him tit for tat in Serbo-Croatian. “ ’Tis some hot in here.”

He felt the mournful russet eyes on his back as he lit his first cigarette in the narrow lane, taking in brisk drags of the country air between two puffs. After he'd followed the main street up for a while, his steps took him round and back, the copper’s beat kicking in out of habit. But nothing spoke of trouble, and Lestrade let himself to be sidetracked into a path that carried through a thin wood and up a slope. Then on to a bulky farm, its yard filled with the familiar conk of geese being herded to their wintering barn. The hillside looked upon a patchwork of fields and pastures, itself blanketed by a thin, grey-green covering of frost, a landscape twice undercover but so fresh under the moon it brought a jolt to Lestrade’s London-weary eyes. 

On one of these patches stood the Crown Inn, where a mini-Sherlock had run along creaky floors and centenarian beams in a manner that would have Lestrade’s mates in Health and Safety keel over in a faint. Lestrade tried to locate it, but the deep blue gathering in the sky was quickly turning into night. Something else was gathering in him, stubborn and angry at the idea of murder spoiling the lovely scene. Lestrade was no innocent. He knew that this, his rustic England, was half an illusion; that behind the glass landscape lay another England that wasn’t always pretty or even safe. But it was Lestrade’s beat, as familiar to him as the rough-and-tumble of his own heart after the climb.

And he couldn’t quiet down, not with what lay before him. For Sherlock, tomorrow night would be another _oh what a night_ , with some acrobatics thrown in to show the world how delightfully Mr Sebastian Moran and Mr Sherlock Holmes danced together. But Lestrade was no dancer in general. And their invitation card had been too smooth, too…pitch-perfect, yeah, its puzzle just twisted enough to catch Sherlock’s eye and bang in Sherlock’s ace field, too, what a coincidence. And the dance set in Sherlock’s old playground, a stone’s throw from his folks’ house. They had all behaved this afternoon as if they were hunters and seekers, Mycroft’s dream-team on a murderer's scent; but the truth was that M had them right where he wanted them. And Lestrade, fumbling for his mobile in his coat pocket, didn’t like it one bit. 

He still didn’t like it fifteen minutes later, but at least he’d managed to arrange some back-up. Donovan had been his first thought, but he’d been put on voicemail directly. Gregson, on the other hand, had begun to sing "Piss off, wanker, pi-iss off, wanker" to the tune of _Auld Lang Syne_ and in very cheery tones for one allegedly on sick leave. Lestrade had waited the first verse out before reminding Tob that he owed him one for the tip-off on the Wisteria Lodge case. Then he’d coaxed and quipped, bartered and blackmailed his way to his fellow senior officer’s promise that he’d come to babysit the cottage on the next day, no questions asked, might even bring a mate. Lestrade rang off and began the trek downhill with a lighter heart.

Half way down, he spotted a man coming up his way in the leafy darkness of the path. His breath caught on a silent snag before the moon picked up the deceptively Playmobil figure, short-legged  under a stolid torso and a puddingbowl haircut, and Lestrade said “John”.

“Evening,” John said. He waited for Lestrade to catch up with him, their shadows striking an impossible distance arm in arm under the moonlight. “Back to the coop, hmm?”

“Is everything…” But they both knew Mycroft would have a few nighthawks up and doing their rounds, and that M also stood for maniac, not showing up before his hour had struck. 

John, understanding him, nodded. “Mary’s phoning Harry. We’ve left the baby with her. It’s a safe option these days, no risk whatsoever of, erm. Bonding with auntie over bottle hours. And Sherlock has just thrown me out.”

Lestrade groaned.

“No, no, my fault, not his.” Not that John sounded penitent in the least. “I made a deduction. He made it clear I should either shut up or clear out, and given I had plenty to say...”

“About the case?”

“Nope.” John chuckled half for himself, kicking a pebble aside with his shoe-cap. “About you and Mycroft.”

“ _What_?”  Lestrade didn’t stop, but his foot caught on a lump of frozen earth, suddenly clumsy. “Why would you do that?”

The unrepentant John did sound a bit sheepish. “Eh. You know what he, Sherlock, what he’s been like lately. All that matchmaking business... it’s vaporized on me, I think. Sort of.”

“Sort of.” Lestrade’s tone juggled echo, emphasis _and_ inquiry.

“Just, I couldn’t help noticing you being so knightly with Mycroft all this afternoon.” John chuckled again. “Telling him you had faith in him, taking Moran down a notch, offering your help...  Might as well have loaned him your own squad car to take him to the Inn, the way you were going. And he called you Greg.”

“John...”

“ Twice. I hear, I hear, and I can observe.” 

“Fuck’s sake, John! That’s...”

“None of my business, I know. Anyway I couldn’t put it out of my head that you two were getting on like bread and jam, and so I asked Mr Consulting Cupid if you were headed for a happy ending by the end of the case.”

“...”

“But he’s in a rotten mood tonight. Must be the waiting,” John concluded philosophically, pausing again to admire a passing red robin. “It was all ‘how can you think of such a thing’ and ‘Lestrade? Marry? I can’t let Lestrade get married, he’s my free pass to the Black Museum’ and ‘it’s not as if it was likely at all, _think_ , John’. And then he threw me out.”

“Too bad.” Lestrade found that he was speaking through gritted teeth. And a heavy heart. Which he found difficult to swallow at the moment, with its side dish of outrage. _Not likely at all_ , Sherlock had said.

* * *

 

He was still stomaching the outrage when he re-entered the cottage, only to find it more than ‘some hot’ on the inside. Their cosy venue was simmering with tension under a busy, buzzing veneer of Christmas jollity. The hunters and seekers had played musical chairs while he was away, redispatching themselves among the various rooms: the kitchen had fallen to Mary and Moran, who had turned it into a high-tech terrorist surveillance unit while curating a salad. 

“Greg! Onions or chives for you?” Mary waved her chopping knife coyly about, then switched on to “Sorry, pet, that was doublespeak for get down on your knees and don’t leave a flagstone unturned. We’re looking for class A pre-planted explosives, not your average creepy-crawlie.”

“Did you Geiger the fireplace? Well, _did_ you?” Moran barked into his phone. He sounded a far cry from his suave everyday self, squeezing a half-peeled tomato in his other hand like a stress ball. Perhaps Bach had not agreed with him after all. “I don’t care what the National Trust eejits told you, I want this place stripped to the bone and made into a safe house by tomorrow night, and when I say safe…”

Lestrade left them to it. In the living-room, he found another debate going on that was just as fast and furious. It was not, however, due to the odds of a zombie adversary blowing up an old and respectable country inn, but to Mrs Holmes’s decision to turn the piano into a salad bar. Lestrade tried to back out, only to be met in the doorway by Sherlock in his pajama bottoms and a hoodie which, by the look of it, had seen its better days in the 1930s.

Any hope that the hoodie would do as a statement of Sherlock’s rotten mood was dashed in the next minutes. If anyone could strop for England it was Sherlock Holmes, and tonight his strop was all over the place. He castigated the ham terrine; sent the fairy lights into high voltage and Mr Wody seeking political asylum under the piano pedals; bitched his father’s evening toast to Happy Families…

 _What’s with my baby?_ came with a sharp glance from Mrs Holmes, while Mr Holmes fingered his bow-tie and squinted at his full glass.

…pointed out, in no particular order, Lestrade’s divorce case, Lestrade’s smoking history, Lestrade’s longstanding affection for banana fritters with chocolate sauce…

 _Haven't a clue_ , Lestrade mouthed back to his hostess. He read the concern in her eyes, not for himself but for Sherlock who paced his new battlefield throwing darts left and right until he was whipping himself into a fever of censoriousness. Lestrade called his name once, to no avail. He knew that tone of Sherlock's: soon enough, Sherlock’s jibes would cross into the danger zone, where he lashed out at his friends much as ordinary folks would call out, to spark a response out of them, and hardly ever with good results. For one blessed moment Lestrade thought he had succeeded: Sherlock turned to him and paused, his curls framing his face like a grumpy halo, his face an odd outpouring of fatigue, frustration, anger and something more inarticulate, some unspoken plea or questioning.

And then, bloody Moran walked in with the salad.

“Dearly beloved! Are we gathered here for the Sherlock Home Entertainment Hour?”

Gone was the dark-edged tenseness of his kitchen hour. Moran was under his own command again, full of his usual lively impudence. No pre-planted explosives, then. Not that there'd ever been a fat chance of them, what with M graciously allowing them a day and a half to check the premises.

“You’re all being very still. Six, no, seven people silent” – and Moran, having entrusted his charge to the piano, bent down and swooped up Mr Wody at arms’ length. “Or is he going full-on Houdini on your minds? That could be fun.”

Half the room burst into loud arguments to the contrary.

“Or we could up the ante.” Moran, being Moran, simply carried on. “Make it a challenge for _us_. Got it! Each of us gifts Sherlock with a thought – anything goes, good idea, bad idea, no holds barred – and he tells us if he thinks we’re being very clever or very dull. Mr Holmes –” 

“Ask my wife,” Mr Holmes said mechanically, then brightened up. “Can it be second-hand clever? I’m told I make a passable imitation of Tony Blair, if you’ll give me just a sec to untie my red bow…”

“Oh _god_.”  Sherlock was tugging at his hair again.

Mycroft, who so far had celebrated the spirit of Christmas Present with a goat’s-milk yogurt, rose with a pained smile. “If you’ll excuse me,” he said. “Contrary to Mr Carroll, I can think of six possible things at the moment, but they’re all guaranteed to annoy Sherlock.” 

Mr Wody barked him up from his new vantage point next to the salad.

“Me three.” Thinking in front of Sherlock was not something Lestrade planned to do on a day off. Plus, he needed to fill Mycroft in about his rash phone call and the imminent arrival of the Met's self-proclaimed finest, D.I. Tobias Gregson. “Look, d’you mind if you and I have a word in private? There’s something I have to tell –” 

“Oh, am I next, then? Oh, this is a hoot!” Mrs Hudson, tucked in one of the larger armchairs near the chimney, lifted both her feet in their black diamanté slippers, aligning them coyly under her eyes.

“Only my brain’s a bit addled by the wine, my dears, Meggie having just poured me another and dear Lord, that’s a big one, as the actress said to the bishop. And Sherlock here is such a funny old hat there’s no way he’d find an old woman’s thoughts clever, but perhaps we can gang up and make it a ladies’ team effort, oooooor” – Mrs Hudson had to pause for a breath – “I can offer three dull but useful ideas instead. One. Sherlock dear, your pj bottoms really need to have their elastic taken in. Two…”

“ _Shut up_ ,” Sherlock said. The next words were not unexpected, but the savage delivery was. It brought a new stillness into the room.

“Of course you will say three things very dull the moment you open your mouth, Mrs Hudson. Is this why your ex-husband married you? So he could use your excruciating chatter as a smoke-screen for his own misdeeds? Or did he leave the straight and narrow because he couldn’t stand to stay in another night and endure it? Pity you can’t also limit yourself as to number when you’re at home.”

And on that final, damning _home_ , Sherlock pulled the hood over his head and stormed out.

John turned to Moran. “That? Was a textbook Bad Idea, Seb.”

But Lestrade did not wait to hear the answer. Or take the worse, much worse statement of Mrs Hudson’s silence – though he did touch her shoulder briefly on his way out. Didn’t think, didn’t ask to be excused, not when he was already nipping out and up the stairs, retracing Sherlock’s outrageous exit.

There had always been a ripple effect between Sherlock’s actions and his own. For every time Sherlock crossed a line, Lestrade busted another. As he did now, marching straight  into Sherlock’s bedroom without so much as a knock or an olive branch. 

“What –” Sherlock struggled up from the bed where he had been lying in a hugger-mugger of sullen limbs, one foot resting on the floor, one cigarette, still unlit, hanging limp from his lips. Lestrade snatched it between his finger and thumb and tossed it aside. It was one of several, he saw, packed inside an old leather slipper hung unceremoniously on the wall by a nail. The slipper rang a faint bell in Lestrade’s memory; perhaps he’d seen it before, or one very much like it, in Sherlock's vicinity.

Not giving it another thought, he grabbed Sherlock’s arm and hauled him up into reluctant verticality. Sherlock tussled a fair bit, but Lestrade didn’t let go. Not he, not when it came to Sherlock these days.

“Gotta speak to to you,” he said. Call it doom, call it privilege -  _speak to you_ had been Lestrade’s gamut with Sherlock ever since his first overtures to a mutic, shivering twenty-year-old, and he’d be damned before he gave it up.

“What you just did – you may think you were smart, bitching at a woman who’s put her heart on the line for you I don’t know many times. Well, guess what? You were _wrong_ , Sherlock.” 

Sherlock’s nostrils flared in vexation. “I don’t see how I’m to be blamed. Being old is no excuse for being such a silly, gossipy…”

“Don’t.” Lestrade found his own temper flaring back. “You don’t get to give porkie-pies, Sherlock, not to me.”

“What –”

“You don’t give me lies!” His tone had Sherlock startled into silence, wide-eyed and off-guard, before he writhed again for release.

“You hurt her feelings, Sherlock! The way you spoke… I wish you’d seen the look on her face. Oh yeah, she’ll laugh it off like she always does, but the smart of it? The memory? Will stay. What the heck is the matter with you? All of today – all of Christmas, Sherlock, _Jesus_ – you’ve given us hell and a half. Those things you said about Mycroft – ” 

He felt Sherlock go deadly still in his grip, before he prised himself loose in two hard twists on his own arm.

“ _Mycroft_ ,” came next, with that strange, gritty bravado in  Sherlock’s voice. He had turned his back to Lestrade, his shoulder blades a rigid plane of dismissal while he made for the door. “It was nice of you to stop over for a chat, Lestrade. But you don’t want to be late, not when you have such a pressing, private meeting, and my brother’s bedroom is only…” 

Lestrade’s hand acted so quickly that his mind, that allegedly slower part of him, had to catch it on the rebound. Before he knew, he had let go entirely of Sherlock, reached out to the wall and snatched the slipper from its nail. Cigarettes flew this way and that when Lestrade, in a strong, slanted arc of the arm, brought his weapon down across the upcurve of Sherlock’s bottom. Later (much later), still marveling about the top-notch precision of that first stroke, he would wonder if the slipper had whistled in its flight. 

The stroke, the blazing sting of it, seemed to petrify Sherlock. He stood on the spot as if arrested in time and space, his face a frozen profile, one blue eye widening under the wild curls. Lestrade side-stepped to face him. There was a baffled light on Sherlock’s face, almost a trance as he finally moved, reaching behind his back and down with one hand to touch the blistered patch.  

 _Better strike while the iron is hot_ , Lestrade told himself, and cracked the slipper again – to his palm. Sherlock jumped. 

“Do you get it now?” Lestrade didn’t have to remind himself to keep his voice low. He took another step, right into the baffled face. Sherlock did not step back.

“That we’re not paper dolls for you to dress up in some crap story or other?” More light came on as Sherlock finally looked at him, half dazed, still half doubtful.

“All that time. All those months, you’ve been telling us who we’re supposed to love, and why, and how much, just...just  ’cause you’re too jittery to find where you stand. In our lives. Life stories. Bloody hell, Sherlock! What’s it gonna take for you to believe in us?” 

He hadn’t expected the silent man to move closer in that tight space between bed and door, its air still warm, or so it felt to Lestrade, from the explosive slap. But Sherlock’s mouth was at his ear now, warming the air some more; its plea unmistakable, gloved as it was in Sherlock’s typical use of the imperative.

“ _Make me try_.”

And Lestrade, his head buzzing with clarity, nodded yes. It was as if, all at once, he knew what to do; never mind that this was something he had never practised before, or even had practised on him despite his ma’s ingrained zeal in raising him proper. But he knew – well, his heart and his arm knew, rising to take hold of Sherlock again, that this was only giving transcribed to another key. Right now, Sherlock needed to snap out of that bastard spiral of insecurity and meanness that always ended up in self-harm to himself and environmental damage to everyone else. And right now, Lestrade would go out on a limb and a slipper to pull him out, if that was what it took.

He gave the closeted room a quick look. It gave back what it had, which didn’t tote up to much. A bed, a table, a stiff-backed armchair – Lestrade tested them in turn, his mind swirled with too-bright pictures of Sherlock doubled over the chair, grasping the table, made to kneel on the duvet, his thighs quivering involuntarily under a volley of smacks... As if guessing his mind, Sherlock turned and walked across to the wall, placing his two hands flat on the surface and letting his head hang awkwardly between his outstretched arms.

“No.” Lestrade had spoken roughly, jolted by some empty, out-of-touch feeling at the defeated pose. “Not like that.”

He caught Sherlock and gathered him to his chest, well away from the unresponsive wall. Sherlock struggled to relax into acquiescence and Lestrade let him have his minute before reaching around him and tapping the slipper lightly to the upper backs of his thighs. A sharp shiver. 

“Deep breath,” Lestrade told him, and drew his arm back on Sherlock’s intake.

He steered the first swats so they would land on one buttock first, then the other, building a tempo that Sherlock could pick up mentally, but that was too sustained for him to process at length. This meant that Lestrade had to rock the two of them a little to bring each swat home, and that the spanking turned and shifted with them, mingling slash and comfort, burning and bonding them at one stroke.  His arm began to cramp; the sweat pearled under his hair, but he smacked on intrepidly, feeling every twitch and start of Sherlock’s body pass into his own as Sherlock trembled in his grasp. Lestrade lowered his free hand, using it to bunch up the limp flannel of Sherlock’s pyjama bottoms, drawing them tight over Sherlock's upper thighs before he moved the sting to them; before his reward was Sherlock's shriek of  _ah_ , _ah_ , while he burrowed almost frantically into the safe place between his arm and Lestrade’s neck.

Lestrade never knew when he dropped the slipper and began to slap his friend's bottom two-handedly, into what must have been a red-rose bonfire of sensation. But Sherlock only leant full-front into him and Lestrade found himself speaking, or babbling, his words another volley of warm, glowing points. _Your brother cares_ , they said, and _that_ _Korean rubbish_ , and possibly at one point _that Irish plonker_ , which might be excused under the recent circumstances. Sherlock was shaking now and Lestrade barely smacked, but he kept up his tender chastising until the first hot tears dotted the side of his neck. 

 _I care_ , he said for what felt the aeonth time, and let his hands cradle Sherlock’s buttocks, chastisers turned protectors, before tightening his arms about him.

Time slowed down from a strafing heartbeat to a drowsy lull, but Sherlock’s tears still ran down his cheeks without any attempt on his part to check them. It was as if the surface pain had broken into a more secret fund of grief, one that had been kept undercover for, what? The better part of two years? Never been allowed a free pass until this day and hour, and then for Lestrade’s eyes only. Loss, isolation, pain harsher and more longstanding than that dealt by his hands, they all welled up now and found release, long after Lestrade had guided the two of them to the bed where they lay down, he on his back and Sherlock curled up on his chest.

He'd thought he would just stay a bit, wait until Sherlock went to sleep to sneak out and find his room again, never mind that he’d missed out on the whole buffet thing. But midnight found them still entwined, he leaning into Sherlock’s warm cheek while his hands caressed the dark hair and drew quiet figures-of-eight over Sherlock's back. And when Lestrade's eyes slid shut at last, it was Sherlock’s lazy breathing that timed his rest; Sherlock in his dreams, running free once again in the sun and the open summer grass.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> They really do get to the Crown Inn in the next chapter. I swear!


	9. Chapter 9

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Summertime! Break time! And about time I wrapped this story up...

Boxing Day turned bright and chipper, bringing out the ox-red paint on the cottage’s front wall and the leafy green of the ivy standing guard before it 

And to Sherlock Holmes, standing barefoot in his parents’ kitchen and staring at an egg, it brought the pure, undiluted excitement of Something New.

“Mrs Hudson.” Sherlock turned eagerly to where his caretaker stood on the threshold, wrapped in something  that looked like the love child of a rainbow and an overgrown hairball but was probably Molly’s latest hand-knitted scarf.  Under the pinks and mauves, her face looked a little creased; deprived of its usual cheerful volubility; a very Huds-off face, which brought him to her side in no time. When she turned the other cheek to him (as she always would, as long as there was a Mrs Hudson this side of forgiveness), he kissed that too.

“I’m sorry,” he remembered to say before she lifted both hands in intuitive concern, and Sherlock got hold of one.  He was not quick enough to stop the other from bestowing a forgiving pat on his trousered backside. “ _Ah_ _!"_ Sherlock winced, and went on _._ "You, ah, you’re not dull at all, I wouldn’t share a house with you if you were, Hudson really married you because you were much cleverer than him at fiddling taxes, and I need you to cook up something with me.”

“Absolutely not.” His mother had stepped into the kitchen, wearing a pink-and-mauve hairy tam’o shanter. “Even _I_ had to give up teaching him toast, when I was still England’s boffin on all things combustible.  Sherlock, did you say the S-word?”

“Oh, he did.” Martha Hudson glanced down at her hand. “Gave me an S-egg, too. What is it I’m supposed to do with the egg, dear?”

“Hide it. And all the others.” Sherlock turned round, a slow-mo version of his usual snap of hips, aware of his mother cocking her head on one side as she inspected him quizzically. He kept his back to her despite the gentle glow that still enveloped its lower, rounder parts, anchoring them and Sherlock to last night’s events. And to the good man who was still sleeping them off on Sherlock’s lanky bed. “Oh, and we’re out of milk too.”

“Not with dear John a houseguest, surely? 

Sherlock waved the edit aside. “Mother, you know about probabilities. What are the odds for the adult British goose to go on rampage if a stranger crosses into its yard five days before New Year’s Eve?” 

“You’re not going up to the farm, are you?” His mother, as always, was answering him crab-wise - matching his query with one of her own. “You know how Mr Barthelemy loves his privacy, and, Sherlock, I really don’t think he’d let you take his birds’ blood pressure. He’s a bit cranky these days, it must be that time of the year…” 

“No, I’m sending Moran and Molly. Mother, do focus. Taking into account the homosocial tendencies within the flock, would you say the geese are more likely to attack Molly, thus triggering Moran’s rescuing instincts? These things have to be _planned_ , you know.”

But even as he spoke, Sherlock was sidling off into the herb garden. The case would be on hold till midnight: he had the whole day to investigate that soft, sweet change of pace from his former manic state. The mellow clairvoyance that felt not unlike the Tibetans’ zazen (minus the seated position, which Sherlock was inclined to skip for the present) or, going back in time, his wake’n’bake  mornings at Uni. Relaxed - glowing - filled with belated peace and good will, Sherlock looked for his next quarry. 

He found him prowling around Mother’s onion bed and very far from either mellow or pacified. In a black cap and black windbreaker, Moran looked wretched, a grim counterpart to yesterday’s white-clad, high-spirited man, all set to flirt recklessly with Sherlock and danger. Now he was all nerves and misery, and his first words were equally unexpected.

“Gotta go and liaise with the Farm,” Moran muttered.

“Well…yes.” Sherlock was perplexed. Had someone, somehow, warned Moran about the geese and Farmer Barleymow’s time of the year? It couldn’t be Molly – she had been so eager to go and visit the farm (and the farm cat), only blushing a little when told by Sherlock that Moran had offered to walk her there. But then, Seb was Molly’s type. Handsome and reckless,yet obviously looking for a partner and not just at the card table. To Mr Barleymoo's they would go, survive the temperamental geese together and find love at the end of the case. Sherlock had it all planned out.

“How utterly nice of you,” he said with an insincere smile, hoping that Moran was not miserable because Sherlock had been avoiding him all morning. Moran could up any game Sherlock threw his way, and would be more than useful tonight, but therein ended his  attraction. From today on he was all Molly’s, and Sherlock wasn’t even interested in a return on profit. He coughed briskly.

“The eggs,” he reminded Sebastian.  “And the milk.”

“Oh…” Seb let out a glum chuckle. “My mistake. I really meant the _Farm_ , as in the C.I.A Headquarters. I’m being recalled, Sherlock."

 _Oh_. Here was a piece of bad news, indeed – for Molly and the case. Sherlock watched the Wild Child of Espionage, his face pinched with frustration, kick at the invisible onions. Then Moran looked back at him, looked closely, questioningly, and Sherlock decided it was time to be his mother’s son. “Really? Where will you go?"

This time, the Colonel’s laugh was positively feral. “Abroad, once again. And leave-taking is the worst, so I’ll show myself out of that conversation, shall I? Just – look out, Sherlock. Tonight. Look sharp and play safe."

“You think…”

“There has to be a reason why they’re pulling me out. And going over your brother’s head to do it. Whatever it is, to me it’s a red flash. They know something we don’t." 

Sherlock shrugged. “Or they want to piss off Mycroft. What could be more natural?”

But Moran’s unease was catching, even as Sherlock made himself outstare these golden eyes, now the genuine tiger’s eye yellow, their lurid fibres a reminder of all the strings and ropes that were being pulled unknown to them. Moran peered at him as if trying to read his thoughts, and Sherlock couldn’t think of anything to say. Leave-taking was, at best, a very dull business; Sherlock’s preference had always been for the cut-and-run option.

“Sherlock…” Moran pulled a face and sighed. “All right, I’ll make this short. You’re one of the cleverest men I’ve ever met, so you must have guessed… yesterday, when we were together, you must have suspected…"

He was cut short by a honk. Mary was beckoning from the Watsons’ family car, a Peugeot juggernaut which she usually drove herself, John’s excuse being that his feet did not reach the pedals.

“Seb! Better come if you want to catch your train!" 

Sherlock waited, half-curious to see what else Moran would do or say to delay their separation. But nothing came, except a long handshake and a short, urgent “Take care” before the lane swallowed him. Too late, Sherlock waved back. Seb had been good fun, all in all, and Sherlock poked his heart tentatively for a twinge of regret – but no. Already, his territorial mind was claiming Seb’s departure for itself.

His superiors had wanted him off the scene tonight. Why? He was the C.I.A.’s golden boy and useful to them, but no more than Mycroft, who, if anything, was the C.I.A’s golden goose. 

Sherlock’s mouth curved up at the simile. But the cold December air now felt galvanic, whipping his mind into more and sharper speculation. From its memory corner came Neilson’s face, bruised into a clot of blood by Sherlock’s fists after the man had assaulted Mrs Hudson in her own flat. _You must have suspected_ , came in a ghost echo. Sherlock had, in fact, wondered at the time if Neilson’s true mission was to make sure that a certain illustrious phone did not end up in Mycroft’s hands, thus striking two reputations with one blow. There had been a feud even then, and two years of Sherlock being let loose on the international crime scene had done nothing to patch it up. Not when he had criss-crossed a number of covert operations, bitched and busted and tricked and exposed a number of agents to achieve his goal. Not when he had paved the way for their handlers to see Sherlock Holmes’s brother as a liability – one that, now, perhaps, could be liquidated with a less-than-golden handshake.

Pissing off Mycroft was one thing. That Sherlock could well and truly understand. But endangering Mycroft?

 _Big boys’ games, big boys’ rules_ , came in another voice, deep and gravelly. Lestrade’s, re-kindling the warmth in Sherlock while he retraced his steps and entered the kitchen again. And there was Lestrade in the flesh, seated before toast and coffee, one hand petting a mug and the other laid flat on the tablecloth – quite unaware that in Sherlock’s mind, he was already grounding the day to warmth and sustenance.

“…apologised to me,” Mrs Hudson was saying. “He’s been such a good egg today, and – oh, there he is! Come right in, dear, don’t stand in the cold. I was just telling Greg…”

Her words had lit a hot tingle in Sherlock’s cheeks, matching its twin down below as he did the honourable thing and came right in. It wasn’t comfortable, but it wasn’t unpleasant either – not with Lestrade’s face lighting up as he did, his coffee-brown eyes glowing with praise until they became their own shade of gold, _mordoré_ , above his happy grin. But then, that was what Lestrade did. Caught every smattering of good in Sherlock, every irregular act done from the heart; caught and honoured them by flashing them back to him with exponential force.

Caught Sherlock’s hand, too, a little clumsily, and tugged it to himself as if he was going to press it to his chest. But no. Ever the man of scruples, Lestrade let go of his hand and glued his own back to the mug.

“…carry a tray up to him,” Mrs Hudson ended, her back still turned to them. “I hope he hasn’t come down with something. Your mother says he’s always so particular about his brekkie and now he won’t even talk to her. It’s not right for a man in his prime to spend all day communing with a laptop, and if _you_ ’ve grown out of this phase…”

“I’ll talk to him.” Sherlock didn’t like how thick the air had become between Lestrade and himself. Or how frustrated he was that the man had changed his mind – people always did around him, and hardly ever to the mind’s benefit – and left Sherlock's hand well alone.

Still, as intentions went, the gesture had been nice. Simple, nice and very… Greg.

Upon this second-best conclusion, Sherlock went up to weigh his options. Moran’s forced exit must have felled a few dominoes in Mycroft’s plans for tonight, all the more if he’d planned to use Moriarty’s former second-in-command to identify him formally. With Moran gone, the game was pitched in Sherlock’s favour. Sherlock smirked and reached for his phone.

_Hullo, brother mine. Fancy a walk?_

* * *

 

Five unanswered texts later, all of them variations on the perks of an early walk before breakfast, Mycroft had made it clear that he was unequal to the exercise. Sherlock was kept waiting at his door and, on giving up finesse and rapping his knuckles to it loudly, met with no answer save the sound of Mycroft pacing about his room. 

At least he hadn’t dragged his blasted piano up with him.

The afternoon did bring back Mycroft, while taking Sherlock’s parents, chaperoned by Mrs Hudson, away on their stage requisite trip to the Highbury Casino Club.  Unfortunately, it then evened up the household by bringing in Tobias Gregson and his ‘mate’ on the stroke of five, hours before the former had been briefed to report on house-sitting duty.

That Gregson’s mate turned out to be Dimmock, pink- and sour-faced in a padded overcoat,  was  no circumstance in his favour.

“What’s _he_ doing here?” John, Lestrade and Sherlock asked of one accord, glaring at ‘the little dick’, John’s footnote.

But Gregson, strutting like a beauty queen before the Holmes’s fireplace, just laughed and said he’d decoyed Ted on his journey down from Norfolk. Dimmock’s exchange programme, it seemed, had been cancelled due to inadequate funding, and so Ted and he had joined forces on their own, luckily for old Strady. Yeah, he’d have another cuppa, mercy buckets. Nice little place Holmes got there, by the way. His bro had one  just like that, only larger on the inside and with an ensuite garage, am I right, Teddy-boy?

It was bad enough to see the pair of them lord it in his parents’ house, Sherlock found, expecting to be fussed and feasted over tea and ‘munchies’ (Gregson). Dimmock was quieter, parading his new co-worker with just a proud hint of sneer, but Gregson was insufferable. And Gregson calling Lestrade ‘Strady’ was the ultimate outrage, picking at each and every nerve in Sherlock like an overtuned violin string! 

“Strady and Butch, they called us back at Hendon. I was Butch. Still am, or so my gopher tells me – they have a ‘dishiest D. I.’ poll going on, silly girls.” Gregson slumped lower into the recess of the couch, spreading his thick thighs. “Now, Mr Holmes – oh, and Mr Holmes, forgot you come in twos, like a Twix bar. Har, har. How can I be of service? Always glad to lend a hand, crash the ball, and Strady here made it sound like he could do with a pair. Of hands. Har, har.”

Sherlock balled his hand around the cigarette he was holding until he felt the paper tear against his palm. He had picked it up this morning on his bedroom floor with the other five or six and kept it, slipping the remainder into Lestrade’s jacket. The coarse insolence of the man, condescending to Lestrade – thinking Lestrade his equal! 

And he just wouldn’t let up. Not when Mycroft, resenting the presence of three officers of the law in his legally challenged operation, put on what Mother had once called his origami face - all creases and smooth impenetrability - and declined his offers of help. Nor when it came out that he had already arranged for their parents to spend the night in Highbury with a pre-empted caretaker. Even less when Sherlock offered to let them look after the house dog. Gregson was clearly of the opinion that tonight’s party was in his honour and that of all concerned parties, _he_ was the most suitable to take the floor.

“Watson’s a married man,” he pointed out. “Gotta stay and look after the little woman, eh doc?" 

Mary opened her mouth, and Sherlock, looking over at John, caught his expectant dart of tongue over lips. But all she said was, “Oh, tonight is ladies’ night, Inspector. Tell you what – why don’t we pair off? I’ll go with you, and Mr Dimmock…”

Dimmock shrugged. “Sure. Anything.”

“…will escort Molly here, so she’s not left all alone? I know the boys will want to get together again for old times’ sake,” Mary concluded, turning aside to rummage in her bag in blissful ignorance.

She did not see Dimmock’s nostrils flare up at the mention of Molly’s name, but she heard the crisp, bitchy bite in his voice when he answered. They all did.  “Yeah, no, Mrs Watson. I’m no longer used to working with amateurs, not after a ten years’ lease in the Force. If Miss Hooper wants to see a…bit of titillating action, I’m sure there’s plenty in the late evening programmes to satisfy her.”

Sherlock’s irritation had crested into rage before the sentence was over; before it had ushered in the awful silence that had to follow the cheap, poisonous slap of innuendo.  For one scalding pulse he was a schoolboy again, tongue-tied by the  intense contraction of anger a moment before he lashed back at the bullies with every word at his command, stammering them if need be.

Then one pulse toppled into the next, and Lestrade’s voice answering first. Same pitch, same deliberate spacing out of words, but Sherlock could hear the filament of steel in each word.

“Yeah, no, Dimmock. _I_ ’m calling the moves tonight, meaning I get to say who’s in and who’s left out. Molly’s in, because she’s shown herself an ally worth ten of the Force and we’ll be lucky to have her expertise.” Lestrade turned to Molly, who was sitting very straight under her pinkening brow and cheekbones. Sherlock knew her to be more than capable of hitting back when the occasion called, but more unwilling to do so when she was off her scene, the warm, cold, sanitized comfort zone of St Barts’s.  Lestrade knew it too, and was acting on the knowledge.

“Care to partner up with me, Molly? I’d be honoured.” He smiled at her. “We can liaise with Mycroft here from the Inn – I’m sure he’ll agree that three level heads is what the case requires.”

And this was all it took for Molly to relax into her own happy smile, and for the conversation to flow again in the dusk-dimmed room, despite Gregson’s faux aside on the lass being lucky Strady had turned such a softie in his old age, not to mention tummy-wise, but to each their own, eh Teddy-boy.

“Sherlock.” His brother’s voice was sharp, cutting across Sherlock’s mind just as it was dispatching a mental caress in Lestrade’s direction.  “A word with you, please.”

The word, it seemed, was _Cigarette_. At least Mycroft uttered it the moment they were past the door, holding out an imperious palm. He supplied the lighter himself. 

“Welly, welly, welly, well.” It was about time somebody else became irritated, and Sherlock’s school years had also taught him that quoting _A Clockwork Orange_ was guaranteed to rile his brother. “Have you made up your rassoodock on what to do with the evening? Apart from letting Greg and me host it, that is.”

Mycroft did not answer at once, possibly because he was busy reacquainting his lungs with Sherlock’s no-chocolate, no-nonsense brand of cigs. When he did, his lower tones were interestingly hoarse. “You have to find a way to send them home.” 

“Who? The Butch and his Boy?” Sherlock shrugged. “They’re a nuisance, but a minor one, surely. And there’s always a chance we might need official back-up if M turns out to be Jim.” 

"They shouldn’t… They’re not supposed to…" Mycroft, for once, appeared to be giving up on words. “This is a very major inconvenience, Sherlock. It’s bad enough that you had to rope in Lestrade, though he at least is up to a certain degree of discretion. But having half the constabulary barge into what is, and should remain, a very _sub rosa_ …” 

He paused to take what an old tobacco trooper like Lestrade would have called a bum puff, though for Mycroft it was a massive drag. Not a case of jitters, Sherlock diagnosed. He had seen his brother truly frightened once or twice in their willy-nilly years of cooperation and was unlikely to forget the sight. No, this was more a case of… 

“…coincidence,” he murmured, checking Mycroft’s flinch for confirmation. Oh yes. Right now, his big brother was being superlatively pissed-off at the universe. Sherlock reviewed their mission brief, hazy as it was, and let the first pieces fall obediently into order. “That man of yours, MI5 or MI6, whatever you call him…” 

“M2,” was the curt reply.

“He’s one of them?” More pieces fell, bringing more light into the hall’s penumbra. “All that time, there were two moles in Scotland Yard. Jim’s...and yours.”

“Only one now,” Mycroft reminded him. “Be thankful that two know how to play the infiltration game. God knows you pestered me enough at the time. And went to such pains with your code names! _Is Geoff safe? What about Graham? What’s being done about Gavin’s stalker?_ A mere G would have done the trick, you know.” 

“We don’t all share your love for abbreviations, Mike.”

“Well, you were happy enough to learn that Lestrade’s team had been…shortened by one.”

Sherlock, silenced, scowled at him. “You never told me who it was.”

As if reflected darkly in a glass, his brother shrugged in turn, then bent to stub his half-smoked cigarette on the floor and slip it under the stair mat. 

“Junior nobody on the team. Scrubbed-up little killer with some bypass name, Jones, Tobes, whatever. Todd, I think. He was on the Bruhl children’s case, not that you’d have noticed him. It was a routine extraction process, all in a day’s work, so I was told.”

For which Sherlock had never thanked him, letting instead the merry-go-round of new faces, new interesting cases, a new lease on life in London whirl him away from his old debts and the oldstanding emotions they covered. He searched Mycroft’s eyes; found them a match to his, poised in the same hard blue purpose. “All right,” he said. “We’ll ground the…nuisances outside, keep them out of sight. But Greg is in.”

Was that the tail of a smile on his brother’s ever-flatlined lips? “Of course. Greg is your inside man.”

Sherlock felt thirty again, twenty, eighteen, bloody _fifteen_. “Well, you need one now that Moran has called quits. I doubt you ever considered me…”

“Quite so.” And Mycroft, already poised to re-enter the living-room, became his origami self once more. “As a matter of fact, I’ll be the man inside.”

“You’re going there? You’ll be there when M shows up, outing yourself?” Sherlock forgot himself enough to grab his brother’s shoulder. “Why? There’s no reason for your being exposed to danger. It’s not as if you ever take part in active operations –”

Unsaid was _Except when I’m concerned_ , memory’s call-out to thought. His war with Moriarty had been Mycroft’s war too, Sherlock reflected, shared and shared unalike because of Mycroft’s vastly superior means. But that had been before. Today, with Mycroft’s position more brittle from every angle, his credit at stake, his former allies withdrawing their pawns, there was every reason for him to take that rash move out of seclusion. 

And yet. With all the pieces in place, the center was still a dark hole, and not merely because they had no idea who M was. Just as the hard blue gaze held to his could not obscure the black pupil at its core, the hard, desperate motive in Mycroft that Sherlock could not quite pinpoint at this instant. All he could read in that exhausted face, a second before it shuttered again, was the familiar claim – the demand of half a lifetime, now reversed from Mycroft to him: _the greatest kindness you can show me will be to let me have my way_.     

He felt his brother’s hand move up to touch his fingers briefly, a gesture too simple to anchor the complex ebb and flow of feelings, motions, impulses that had been left loose in the past forty-eight hours. Then Mycroft said, ‘Time’s running’. 

And Sherlock followed him back into the room, as he would later follow him out into the open, and the waiting cars, and through the ups and downs of their childhood’s shire until the shadowy façade of the Crown Inn loomed up on the horizon.

 

 


	10. Chapter 10

_You’ve grown_ could have been carved on the decayed plaster and oak: a writing on the wall, for his eyes only. The inn itself had only grown in character, as is generally the way with ruins, given time; but in the same time it had shrunk into a smaller scene. Now it looked precisely what it was, nothing more; a two-room box, its stone façade reclaimed by ivy, its roofing three-quarters gone except for the timber frame which Sherlock had once clambered to ‘walk the plank’ while it made the ground seem a hundred feet below, crunching his beloved Redbeard into a mere Wody.

Now he could barely see the beam for the sharp spotlights tacked to it by Mycroft’s team the day before. But as he pulled his coat belt tighter, Sherlock knew that it was there. Suddenly, it was as if time and space had done a turnabout and he was standing in the air again, engulfed in his own heartbeat as he looked into the abyss. Helpless, terrified, yet clinging to the thought that he _had_ to do it, and he _had_ to return safely down below, where his one friend waited in unconditional faith.

As if pulled by an invisible string, Sherlock crossed over to the fireplace where Lestrade stood and placed the flat of his hand on Lestrade’s breast-pocket.

“...Guess again, sunshine.”

He never guessed. But he waited until Lestrade had dipped a hand into the right-side pocket of his coat and held it out palm up to out his own offering. It was met with a chuckle and a “What, you stash ’em at your parents’ too?”

Sherlock gave him a slanted nod as he slipped the extra badge into Lestrade’s pocket.

“Want me to look my best tonight?” came next, though Greg didn’t sound angry at all. "You daft lad. What next, me packing a tux for the arrest?"

Not that he would, Sherlock thought, his eyes following Lestrade’s progress while the D.I. paced their new stakeout. The Butches of this world bagged their man and rounded up the limelight, wrapping up their case with a hey and a ho, and a finishing touch of brillantine. Lestrade didn’t give a rat’s arse if the limelight caught him slouching or playing with the flap of his ear; held his press confs in a beige and pink plaid shirt – once, memorably, in a nylon plaid shirt – and when the press misspelled him as Lobstrade, which it did at fated intervals, only said, “ _Told_ them to send Jones instead”.

“Sherlock.” His brother had intercepted Lestrade on his self-guided tour and was beckoning him. As he moved closer, Sherlock spotted the tiny radio receiver dangling from Mycroft’s outstretched hand and scowled. The two men were already rigged; not so Sherlock, who hated patching himself with silicone unless he was in disguise.

“Time to deploy,” Mycroft said. “We’ve put Gregson in the necessary house –” of course Mycroft would use the period term for the tiny brick house which had once served as the inn’s privy. Unless he’d done so to coax Gregson into thinking this was preferential treatment? You could never tell with Mycroft. “Molly’s keeping him company, brave girl. Mrs Watson thinks she can – oh good, she’s in position.”

Sherlock craned his neck to peer up at Mary. She had free climbed the façade, taking her cue from the ivy’s jagged path, and was crouching on the roof frame, out of the light. The gun in her hand was new, an ultra-compact lightweight Browning. Yes, trust the Watsons’ arsenal to go forth and multiply, too.

“John is walking the long passage. With long steps. It seems he’s taken a fancy to impersonating you, Sherlock.”

“I heard that," came the brisk reply. "And it’s not _that_ long, really; if Sherlock hides in the card-room, he can be here in no time.”

The card-room was the smaller room at the end of the passage; the main room, in which they were gathered, had been built many years ago for county balls and receptions. This was before rural exile had struck and industry played into nature’s hand, with the woods reclaiming most of the hamlet for themselves.

“Two of you in the corridor, one in the card-room.” Mycroft dismissed them with a Mycroftian horizontal flourish of fingers. No mention of Dimmock was made, none requested: he had been dumped with Mycroft’s merry men at an earlier barrage. “My man’s on his way; I’ll be waiting here until he joins us.”

“I’ll take the card-room,” John said. The tip of his putty nose blushed when Sherlock looked over at him, though the cold air might have been to blame.

“Me for the passage, then.” Lestrade poked his finger at Sherlock’s sleeve. “Which leaves you, sunshine. You decide – it’s you who found the place for us, after all. It’s your big night, Sherlock." And Lestrade drew his arm back as if to offer Sherlock the lie of the land, the empty house in which they stood, and his own bottomless fund of trust.

“Who are you gonna dance with?”

Sherlock did not hesitate.

“With you.” The curt gasp in his back made him wonder if he was missing out on some fine point of police procedure. Self-consciously, he added, “If you will ask me”.

Lestrade ‘s eyes twinkled, but he did ask “Will you?”, holding his hand out for the second time in the evening.

“Ten to eleven,” their M. C. tolled from the door. “Sherlock Holmes, pick a partner!”

“Lucky thing I’m not your bro,” Lestrade remarked as Sherlock towed him back into the mouth of the corridor. “You wouldn’t want to be seen working hand-in-hand with me!”

“I find it _very_ lucky you’re not my brother,” Sherlock said, and left it at that.

He rearranged himself secretly for the waiting, slowing his heart to a duller beat until it could be quickened again at the kill. This was hard – harder than usual, when his body could be made to fit his purpose like a glove. The empty house should have inspired him, but it only brought up memories of dizziness, disorientation, a child’s head swirled by the air under his feet. _Look sharp_ , Seb had said, speaking of a danger they did not know. What Sherlock now felt, with sharp night serendipity, was a sense of fear.  

All day long he had played sceptic to Lestrade’s believer, out of spite and jealousy. Now, at the eleventh hour, Lestrade firmly by his side, he no longer knew what to think. It was Baskerville all over again, when he had been certain there was no bogeyman, because nothing came out of the nothing that was death. And yet. And yet he had seen a ghost in the night, and the thing had rattled him almost out of his mind. Moriarty _was_ dead; Sherlock had watched the man’s brain leave his body – his soul a more open question – and carried with him, in his leap, the tart smell of spent gunpowder. But the murders – and the visiting cards – the puns, aliases, the chemical cryptogram, the entire damnable, delicious riddle? All of them showed the dark mordant of Moriarty’s wit. So what? Clever people faked their deaths; Moriarty was a dab hand at smoke and mirrors. It was improbable, but not impossible, not by a far stretch. In a moment, Sherlock would know the truth.

Why, then, did he feel that shiver up his skin? What was it that felt so wrong, when the game felt so right?

He closed his eyes and tried to focus. But all he saw was Mycroft’s straight back, poised at the very center of the riddle - the point equidistant to all four corners of the room. Core of the labyrinth, where M had led them step by step, using every bent and twisted means at his disposal to ensure that very endgame: Mycroft in the next room, surrounded with empty cold air.

But not alone, Sherlock pleaded with his mind. Not alone!

He peered up to the eagle’s nest of shadow where Mary hunkered. Mary Morstan, mother, ex-mobster, wife of an ex-member of the RAMC. _What was his mind answering?_

“Sunshine.” His shoulder was being held, shaken gently. “You all right?”

He was breathing too quickly, too many gulps of the cold night air as his pulse beat the time for his thoughts. Too many, too many… Morstan, Moran. Moran was gone, but not Molly, Moran’s mate in a match made in heaven and Sherlock’s manoeuvers…

Sherlock’s eyes opened wide.

 _...one M too many_.

“Greg.” He knew what he had to say next, once he pushed the words past the thin crackle of Lestrade’s radio. “Tell me. Quick. When did Todd leave your team?”

Sight back in focus, he watched as curiosity got the better of Lestrade’s concern, tinged with surprise.

“How do you know –”

“Tell me!” An order, a plea, woven to the unspoken verb. _Trust me_.

“Week after you jumped.” Lestrade knew when to be brief. “The guilt got to his head, poor sod. That it was him going over mine, that day, that gave you the push. I hushed it for his wife’s sake, she’s still with us, and I kept in touch with him –”

“Anderson?” Brightness struck harder, a phoenix’s flight now. Anderson was the _wife_ ’s birth name – though the man had been legally entitled to it, a rare but not unseen case of patronymic transference. Oh, but the light was everywhere, blinding the sound of tyres as they braked to a halt; the slam of a door.

Anderson, who spoke German, who had known what _Rache_ stood for all those years ago. Who must have known that _Tod_ was the word for _death_ , striking a bit too close to business for comfort. A potential magnet for derision, which Dr. Anderson had always feared and loathed. And thus he had changed his patronym, though the change would have been easy to spot for any man versed in tracking down a target’s history. And later on, when his departure had left Lestrade’s team short of one, this Todd-shaped empty place could just as easily have been used as a story, alibi, by...

In their peripheral vision, Mycroft’s tall form moved off-centre, one arm raised in welcome.

“ _Get back!_ ”

John had been right: it took no time at all to be out of the passage. But no-time was still not enough: not when their next, blundering step into the main room showed them Mycroft in the stranger’s grip, his head angled unnaturally against the man’s shoulder. The boyish-looking man with a boy’s crewcut and a puny white face: if the room had been any darker, Sherlock could have mistaken him for Dimmock. And yet Mycroft held himself very still against him, his face a chilled grimace of shock, even though the grip was all in the traitor’s left arm pinning him back to chest.

All this he saw over Lestrade’s shoulder, after Lestrade had caught and bundled Sherlock behind him a moment before. All this, and the syringe at Mycroft’s neck, its tip not quite breaking skin. Mary must have spotted it from above, white upon white in the glare of the spotlights, its small glass canister filled with some transparent liquid.

“James,” Lestrade said, his voice hard. He was leaning back, not out of fear but as a sign that Sherlock was not to trespass into _that_  crime scene. “What’s your bloody game?”

“Hullo, Detective Inspector.” There was something cottony about that voice, as if its owner had little use or interest for direct speech on an everyday basis. But then he smiled, his eyes suddenly too full and too dark for their whites, as if the blood had rushed straight to his head at the sight of Sherlock. He cocked his head slightly on one side and Sherlock saw how right he’d been about the family air. Only, not Dimmock.

“James Moriarty,” Sherlock said. He watched as the dark eyes became even more familiar, voluble with an excitation that made them slightly watery and truly sickening. “Jim’s brother, I presume.”

Who had taken Jim’s name as his lawful alias when he’d become the triple agent in their tangled web – Mycroft’s man at Jim’s behest, Lestrade’s man under Mycroft’s command, and Moriarty’s man from the start. Unless James _had_ been his birth name, a parent’s attempt to right fate after their first-born proved himself a bad’un, only for James to take it as permission to copyright his brother? Or had they always planned him as a substitute, against the day when Jim’s nihilism would be his downfall? Alienation ran deep in the Moriarty stock, and mothers had much to answer for.

“So this is all about revenge. How predictable.” This from Mycroft as he raised his chin cautiously to meet Sherlock’s gaze. The connection was not in the words, Sherlock knew, but in Mycroft’s body language, the way he was slackening against his captor, every limb a loose weight. It must have taken a tremendous force of will to appear so blasé; but there was the difference between the man who had never been his own man, and the man who knew himself so intimately that he controlled every muscle, every synapse in himself. Sherlock watched as Mycroft’s face relaxed into indifference, striving to follow his cue.

“Nice imitation game, James. That is, decent enough. The pink card was a little high-coloured, even for our Moriarty. Wouldn’t you say so, Sherlock?”

“Guess so.” This was hard, harder than he’d thought. To sound indifferent when the needle was still hovering at Mycroft’s neck. Sherlock could do it, and was beginning to see why he should, but he would have to use brief sentences.

“And the stingless bee. Jim was never that good at entomology.”

“Shut up. Shut up! He was good at _everything_.” The clone’s voice quavered briefly. As did his hand. “And he taught everything to me, so that I would be as good as him. The James of Jim, he used to say. The me of him, so that he’d never die.” James’s teeth peeped briefly through his smile and Sherlock felt Lestrade’s repressed jolt of nausea, similar to his. No wonder Dr Manders had become catatonic with fright once he had spotted his patron among the police officers arresting him.

“And so I knew how to bait you, all three of you, because I had to get you together. You, who arrested him”  – the night-dark eyes paused on Lestrade  – “tortured him” - the needle again, firmer, closer - “and made him choose death over me. And I made the trail as he would have, all the way to this place, because he knew - Mycroft told him, it was part of their agreement  – how special it had been to you. I’m going to burn you here, Sherlock. Make you watch as I put a red dot on your brother, and fill him with…”

“Acid,” Mycroft supplied when Sherlock couldn’t. “Yes, yes, very clever, having Sherlock deduce the very means of my death. It’s too bad, really, that it was I and not Jim who realized your full potential.”

“He did! Shut up, you, you...he did, he _made_ me who I am!”

But once again, the hand shook a little. Alienation made James strong but it also made him empty. Lethal but a lightweight, just like Mary’s weapon; trapped forever in his mad vertigo of identity. And just as the realization struck Sherlock, he felt Lestrade’s head knock softly against his, the tiniest nudge to the left. Sherlock followed the nudge, his gaze scuttling to the sash window and its few remaining panes of glass.

It was illuminated from the outside. James must have parked his car before the house, Sherlock deduced, and left the lights on. They shone a bright yellow, filling the window frame and giving him a glimpse of the shadow on the car, balanced precariously, swinging himself to and fro…

“Well, Jim did mention you before he shot himself,” he said loudly. It was touch or go, but it worked; James’s smile faltered, and the tip of his tongue showed through it as he stared at Sherlock. The needle dangled from his hand.

“On that roof. When he told me that I could kill him if I liked, yes, but he would never die. I asked him what he meant, and… I’ll tell you if... ” Sherlock lowered his voice, waiting until the madman’s avid, suspicious gaze held his. Slowly, half reluctantly, Sherlock lifted one arm over his head. “Truce?”

The air on their left exploded. It filled with shatters of glass, noise, rotten wood, as space leapt into action; as the leap became Moran, his face a crossfire of angst and furor. He lunged across the room to the whistle of Mary’s bullet,landing with Western-like accuracy at Mycroft’s feet and toppling the captor and his prey sideways. Mary obviously expected John’s punch to meet James’s better profile. Their neat choreography, however, was spoiled by Mycroft taking one step into the fray and catching James’s wrist in his hands. Only Sherlock heard the snap, though James’s howl hit every ear in the room.

“I’ll have this,” he said, raising his voice over the man's wails and lowering his arm.

“It’s all yours.” Mycroft placed the cylinder in his offered palm. With typical economy of gesture, he curled Sherlock’s fingers over it. “I find it very lucky that we _are_ brothers, Sherlock.”

Sherlock had no idea how to answer, but was spared the pain of looking for Significant Words by Moran’s rasp of throat. Moran still looked fiery, and his next words had nothing suave about them.

 “You bloody eejit.”

Sherlock stepped back, but only because Moran’s elbow was pushing him mercilessly out of the way.

“Meeting a serial killer in a three-piece suit! I've told told you, again and again -”

Sherlock blinked. Moran was now pushing _Mycroft_ against the wall, his voice a fervent hum. Was bending his head to the exposed neck, not the side where the tip of the needle had lain but lower, against the very dip where life pulsed in Mycroft’s throat. Moran pushed his mouth to it, again and again, his words blurring.

 “Turtleneck - leather band underneath, round the - reinforced leather - what _were_ you thinking of?”

Mycroft’s hand rested on the coppery hair. “Just waiting for my man,” he whispered.

Sherlock had never been one to quail at casual voyeurism, but this was too much: this secret cult of two, his brother one of them. He gargled something about fresh air and, as if drawn to his natural habitat, found himself in the part of the room where Lestrade knelt next to a white-faced murderer.

 “...will say may be used against you,” Lestrade concluded. He didn’t look up when Sherlock drew near, but spoke on after a pause, his voice rough with feeling.

“You poor bastard. Think this was love? What he did to you? Then you know diddly-squat about it.”

James, curled around the wrist he held to his chest, had nothing to say. Sherlock had; but the room was filling up with even more light, more parasitic voices. He was still searching for Significant Words when Lestrade struggled up; when he and Sherlock were surrounded from every angle, taken aside, rent asunder as the officials took the floor and Lestrade took the lead. This was what he did best, with a quiet authority that was ten times more efficient than Gregson’s Met-honoured bark of command; but Sherlock, standing alone in the long passage, felt the draught of cold once again.

Something was being closed with the case; something that was Christmas, and all the schemes and hopes and connivance that had bloomed in its afterglow.

But not _their_ glow, Sherlock resolved for himself. That would never go, oh no. Not if there was any-diddly-thing he could do about it.

 

 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I've had to add an extra chapter - stay tuned for the epilogue!


	11. Chapter 11

“Sherlock, can you come over to our place? John wants to see you. He _must_ see you.”

"But I’m already on my way to NSY," Sherlock griped. He stood on one foot before his front door, a less-than-dab hand at tying his shoelaces while juggling his coat, scarf, phone and an aggravated toy dachshund with the other hand.

“NSY as in New Scotland Yard?”

“No, NSY as in the North Somerset Yakuza,” came in John’s faraway voice, pitched down to a drawling, top-drawer baritone. It made him sound like a snobby Santa. “Of course I mean New Scotland Yard. Heh, heh.”

“John, stop impersonating Sherlock. That way lies madness, as we’ll all remember from now on. Sherlock, stay right where you are, I’m coming with the car. We need to talk.”

“We are talking,” Sherlock informed her tetchily, only to have Mary say ‘Humph!’ and hang up on him. He cocooned Mr Wody firmly into his scarf and coat, scowling at the bloat of traffic. During his last stay in the car, he had been made to share the backseat – ‘the kids’ table’, John had called it – with a six-month infant, and been persistently sneezed at. Little Viola, a true Watson, had an A-1 sense of marksmanship.

Thirty minutes later, it appeared that John had nothing much to say, whereas Mary was under the illusion that Sherlock needed to have his heart sellotaped after the events in Surrey. He listened with one ear while Mr Wody, now adding car sickness to his list of physical complaints, clawed his way up his coat sleeve.

“…quit the CIA," Mary was saying. "He was on the phone with Adlair, his handler, all the way back to London. Where he’s planning to settle down, well, that’s one word for it.”

”Two,” Sherlock corrected her on principle.

”Be running MI6 for Mycroft in two years, tops, if you ask me.”

“His one true M.” John winked at Sherlock in the rear-view mirror. Sherlock returned a blank look.

“And Adlair had better play his cards safe, because Seb isn’t the type to forget or forgive. Not that I’m much inclined to forgive him myself. The way he flirted with you, Sherlock! Buttered you up like a butterscotch tart, oh, no offence meant, love…”

“Breadstick, more like.” And John was on a roll, by all appearances. “Chill, Polly. Admit it, you’re only pissed off because Seb led _you_ on. Saw how keen you were to set him up with Sherlock and used it as one of his tricks. Of course Sherlock saw through him.”

“Of course.” And Sherlock turned to hold a very limp Mr Wody up to the open window, careful not to meet John’s eye. “All in the tie. Mycroft’s tie, that is. Very, ah. Elementary. Yin-yang pattern - white and red, ice and fire, intellect and energy, peace and war. A gift, probably dating back to that other Moran business, when they had to sort out loyalties and, and. And Morans. Pesky business, really, all these family doubles. Are we there yet?”

“It was the darling wish of my heart that you two… Oh, bother. Still, bad Moran. I mean, I get the whole secrecy thing; it comes with the territory.” (Mary shifted her gaze from the road to flash it apologetically at John.) “But he did tease and taunt poor Mycroft something awful.”

“Mycroft gave as good as he got,” Sherlock said. “If anything, better. Don’t underestimate my brother, Mary; he knew exactly when and how to get Moran back into his orbit.” By exposing himself to the stark, dark, staring madness of a Moriarty, Sherlock thought, making himself stare at love and what it could work in an absolutist like Mycroft. Tentatively, Sherlock felt glad for him; glad that Mycroft would no longer be alone, now that he had the heart and loyalty of the second most dangerous man in the world.

“And Seb did come back and save the day, so he is partly excused. Partly, mind!”

“He’s not the Messiah,” John quipped in. “He’s a very naughty boy!”

This earned him a jackpot of giggles, in which Sherlock joined only so he could ease the tight, tender knot in his throat. For New Scotland Yard was now in sight, a glass landscape with figures, rising and shining in the harsh blue winter sky. And in all of Sherlock’s history with London’s police force, this was the first time he felt hesitant to come in.

He heard the door on his side click softly open as the safety catch was released. “Off you go,” came the brisk order, followed by John leaning back on his seat for a godspeed wink. “Greg’s waiting for you. You go and tell him – everything he needs to hear.”

 

* * *

 

The knot stayed with him through the revolving door and up the lift, across the Xeroxed desk spaces which paved the way to Lestrade’s office.

It sat in Sherlock’s stomach now, a small, paradoxical heartburn, as if he'd had eaten too many of Mrs Hudson’s mince pies and still felt hungry under the burn. He swallowed and pushed Lestrade’s door open.

“Mr Holmes! Come to join the party?” Gregson was seated in Lestrade’s chair, his feet on the desk and the desk littered with a number of bottles, cans and greasy paper bags. He groped around for a tissue, found none and snatched one of the papers to wipe his mouth. “Strady told you about his little do?”

“I…” But Sherlock stood transfixed at the door. Lestrade’s office had always been the Englishman’s proverbial castle, half home, half ashram; a one-man space, where social meshing was strictly prohibited save between Lestrade and his coffee thermos. Even Donovan had learnt to toe the line and pass on her messages from the threshold. Not perched on the desk, her natty shoes crossed at the ankles while she toasted half of Lestrade’s division in Homicide with a cheese and chutney sandwich.

“Um, yeah, be my guests. Both of you.” Lestrade was standing next to Sherlock, sans beer and his face more crumpled than a face had any right to be, though it had lit up at their sight. He touched the dog’s soft muzzle, tucked against Sherlock’s cheek, and let his finger run down its length in a light caress. Sherlock’s breath caught on the knot.

“Got your text,” Lestrade whispered. “Sorry about the scrum. It’s a… it’s Toby’s idea, really.” He scratched his nose, using the alibi to look down it at the culprit, whose face shone with grease and good will.

“Pre-emptive support rally,” Gregson roared. “To show Strady we’re on his side before the news hit the fan about James, and his case turns out not such a copper-bottomed success after all. Har, har. _I_ managed the invites; he managed the snack. Cold snack, I have to say. Bit stingy with the grub, are we, old man?”

“Eat my strawberries,” Lestrade replied, his Somerset burr making the delivery twice as raunchy. Gregson merely snickered.

“I thought you might want a full report. You usually do,” Sherlock said, immediately aware that he sounded less like a rallying supporter and more like a stick-in-the-mud. He tried to model himself on Mr Wody, now totally relaxed in his arms and looking with approval at the office’s sealed windows. “I, I, I can come back at a more convenient moment if you need to indulge in peer-to-peer networking.” Oh God, and now he sounded like a stick-up-the-arse. Why was Greg smiling at him?

“Christ, no. I’m glad you came, Sherlock, real chuffed. Just, we’d better step round to Sal’s office, this place’s a mess. Here – take this – just a few things I’ve prepared for the little fella. To keep him amused. Your ma still in Highbury?”

Before Sherlock could answer yes, the door opened again and a constable popped his head in. “Guv, you’re wanted over at Box Hill.“ 

“ _Damn_ ,” Lestrade said. Box Hill, Sherlock knew, was house slang for the chief superintendent's office, where the officer summoned got his ears boxed and his knuckles whacked more often than not. News about James must have hit the fan indeed. Sherlock watched as Lestrade braced his shoulders, slinging the burden of responsibility in a gesture so well-rehearsed it had become invisible even to the performer.

"Sorry, guys, Sherlock, I gotta… Sherlock, just wait for me, yeah?"

And he was gone, leaving a white box filled with odd bits and bobs. The dachshund, overjoyed to find a fellow hoarder in Lestrade, trotted over and began to fetch one curio after the other so he could show them to Sherlock. The D. I. had done all in his power for Mr Wody’s entertainment: there was a yellow plastic mask, a toy train engine, a rubber ball that Sherlock, with a secret pang, knew for the last piece of the Reichenbach debacle, and... and so many treasures, dotting all the way back to their first cases together.

Lestrade had kept them all. Lestrade had made a _collection_ of them,

Sherlock knelt down and took the ball from the dog, bouncing it a few times on the ground only to feel how solidly it leapt back into his palm.

“...Sherlock?” Molly’s voice cut through the warm mist of sensation, just as Gregson was saying “Ah, and here’s the Morguette, dressed to kill. Har, har. Got my invite, sweetie?”

Molly, coming eagerly into the room, said yes, and yes she’d love something juicy, oh, um, she really meant _juice_ juice. She wore the green-and-white checkered dress last seen on the day of Sherlock’s party, when he had taken his first step in marital consulting. But she wore it with a difference. She looked smart and self-confident, with a touch of radiance echoed in the golden heart-shaped charm worn on a chain around her neck. The dress now marked the end of the journey, Sherlock saw: she wore it as a woman in love, clad in green and gold, out to get the golden-eyed Irishman of her dreams.

 _Journeys end in lovers meeting._ Sherlock saw it all, and felt awful. So brave, his Molly; so ready to take another chance on love after it had bruised her so many times, only because Sherlock had said he would show her Mr Right. And he, the great detective, had picked out the wrong man in the line-up. Twice. And Molly hadn’t been there when the latest Mr Right laid his claim on Mycroft: when she’d come, Moran was busy vanishing into the night, leaving a broken wrist in his wake for her to patch up.

“Oh god,” Sherlock moaned, lost to the throes of irony and a kneecap cramp as he struggled to get up.

“He’s not here.” Molly was pouting. “And neither is your brother. It’s too bad – surely, we can’t have a proper celebration if they’re not here?”

“Ah, yes. As to that.” Sherlock caught her shoulder and leant heavily on it, hoping to prompt forgiveness by a show of vulnerability. “Molly, there’s something you need to know.” 

“And I have to tell him how brave he’s been, and…” Molly blushed as she spoke, her face lit up from the inside like a pink candle. “And how grateful I am to him. For rescuing me yesterday. I felt so exposed, and they were such a horrible, nasty, hissy… oh, um. Oops. P’rhaps I should keep my voice down.”

Sherlock looked at her. “But you’ve never been near the geese." 

“The geese? What on earth are you talking about?”

“You and Moran,” Sherlock began, only to be interrupted again.

“Sebastian Moran? You didn’t think – oh, Sherlock! You have to be teasing me. Seriously? You see through everyone and in everyone’s heart, of course you know who I mean.”

“No! No, I don’t!” Nor did he know why his voice had grown the opposite of low. In the corner of his eye, he saw Donovan flash him a glance from her vantage point on the desk. 

“I mean Detective Inspector Lestrade, of course!” And Molly, under his horrified eyes, put one hand up her throat. “Who else? Didn’t he stand up for me, when those two” –  she jutted her chin towards Dimmock and Gregson as the latter held the former entranced with a tale about his much superior office parties, and his team letting loose a _real_ silver fox among the paperwork for his fiftieth birthday – “were so rude? Oh, I’ve been such a silly chit. Running after Jims and Toms and Teds, when there was a Greg all along! Never seeing what a lovely, loving man he is and, oh, what hot fuzz!”

“Greg.” By now Sherlock’s warm mist had turned into a substratospheric chill. “And you. You and Greg. You’re, what? Hoping that the two of you can become a…” 

“An item,” Molly supplied helpfully. “Yes!”

“And you think Lestrade would be amenable…”

“Yes, yes! I’ve done what you always tell us to.” Molly’s voice dropped to a cloaked whisper. “I’ve observed him! Carefully! Bit like a p-m, only not quite, more like, you know…” 

“Check if he’s ready and willing to share the, erm, little death.” 

“Oh, yes. And my diagnosis is that he’s – what you’re saying. Ooh, Sherlock! Only think, I was there when he put the gravy under surveillance.”

“What?!”

“In your mum’s kitchen. So sweet and rumpled, his sleeves rolled up to the crook of his elbows … his  _big_ hands upping the heat… putting the oven door in its place with a strong push of hip… I swear, if I’d been the gravy, I’d have overfl… ”

“Yes, yes, yes, _no_!” Sherlock clutched the rubber ball, his palms growing sweatier by the minute. “Molly, you cannot base empirical assumptions on Lestrade’s shirt. That’s all wrong."

“Well, I do. And I say he wants to be a lover and a husband again, and a man good at both. There!” And Molly closed her evidence with a tap of foot. “Now tell me, Sherlock. Do you see any hope for me?”

What Sherlock saw was darting through him like a Watson bullet on its best behaviour: _Greg Lestrade must marry no one but himself!_

Before he knew better, he had dropped the rubber ball, caught Mr Wody up on the rebound and was pouring him into Molly’s pastoral lap.

“Here. Keep him well-watered, don’t tell him about the autopsies.”

“But, Sherlock!” 

“I have to go. Somewhere. To see… someone.” Already he was darting out of the room, pausing only to throw a rueful, explanatory “I have to be _first_!” over his shoulder before he darted into the lift cabin.

He never saw who had walked up to Molly to watch him go; who slipped an arm round his friend’s neck, her hand toying softly with the golden chain.

“Story of his life,” Donovan said. “You think that’ll do the trick?"

“If it doesn’t, I don’t know what will. Silly boy.” Molly smiled, leaning into the crinkly, maple-brown touch of Donovan’s hair. “I wonder what he meant with the geese?”

“Dunno. But if he’s planning to marry you off to a simple and honest farmer, I’ll march him to the cell bench _first_. So. You all packed and ready? The boss won't need me tonight, not while he’s caught between a rock and Sherlock Holmes.”

“Ready and willing.” They smiled, clever only in their hard-won understanding of each other. Donovan touched the little heart-shaped pendent. A few officers in the room might have recognised it as the lucky charm she once wore on their toughest night raids.

“Let's go home and give Mr Wody his dinner. You don't mind if he stays over, do you?” 

“Not a bit.” Donovan glanced over at Gregson, who was dismissing the party with a blind eye to the scattered junk. “I know my way around police hounds. But I think…”– a headshake, a grin lopsided and tender – “…I might still turn out a cat person, love.” 

 

* * *

 

Sherlock’s good name, being what it was with the CS, might not have sufficed to let him accede Box Hill. James’s name, tossed negligently in the antechamber, proved a better lever. Sherlock walked into the office in time to catch the end of a fuming tirade, one which left the speaker’s thick glasses fogged with righteous ire. He was berating Lestrade both for not having taken the initiative sooner and for having taken it without running it by the Complaints Investigation Branch, the Ghost Squad, Human Resources, the Counter Terrorism Command and the superintendent’s private email. The super was being very forceful about the last. 

Lestrade looked calmer, though Sherlock could see his left hand’s fingers itching to beat a tattoo against his thigh. He tried to speak, only to be out-spluttered.

“… interviewed on _Panorama_ next week. What the hell am I to tell them? That we’ve been coddling a terrorist mole for the last three years? _Three years_ , Lestrade! And you’ve had him in your sights all that time?” 

“Wrong.” Sherlock pushed the door closed and made a beeline for Lestrade. The CS, perhaps remembering how he’d once been socked by proxy, took a counter-step behind his desk.

“Or vice versa, rather, but who cares if God’s in the details? Just tell them you’ve caught your man, and Detective Inspector Lestrade led the covert operation with his customary flair and expertise. Oh, and there was Gregson, too, but he spent most of it in the loo.” 

“Sherlock.” Lestrade’s groan barely hid his chuckle. “Speak of time and place.”

“Mr Holmes.” Lestrade’s chief was wiping his glasses and, at this juncture, his forehead. “These are not matters to be discussed with a civilian…”

“Mr Holmes is our contact with MI6,” Lestrade said loudly. It put Sherlock in mind of a Tibetan proverb, the legacy of his one and only interview with Tibet’s highest authority: _Goodness shouts, evil whispers_. “As I told you, sir, James was kinda multi-tasking as a mole. If we’re in a pickle, they’re in a jam.”

“And have more to lose if the jam goes boom,” Sherlock dovetailed. 

The superintendent’s eyes went from one man to another. “So what you’re saying is… I should…”

“Call in a few favours before your broadcast. Obviously. Then make James Moriarty’s arrest an inside job – name it Operation Jackpot II, cute wink back to the nineties, go for a historical quote or two, _it’s not a scandal to have a corruption problem, it’s a scandal not to recognise it_. Sod it all,” Sherlock concluded, borrowing Lestrade’s pet coda and stunning the two men into silence. He turned to take what was his, had to be his by right of precedence: Lestrade’s big, warm, open-hearted hand, which Sherlock slapped to his chest, right where his pulse broke from his heart. “Now we’re talking.”

Lestrade closed his mouth. A few seconds elapsed, but nothing came, save for the superintendent’s heavy breathing and Sherlock’s attempt to look Lestrade full in the face. He cleared his throat invitingly; silence answered. Of all the times to shut up, Sherlock thought, his mind frantic with gambits, openings, and the multiple ways they could go wrong.

“Moran,” he blurted out. “Moran is… well, Moran is half an item.”

“Lestrade, is this some code I should be aware of?”

But Lestrade’s eyes only twinkled. “Yeah,” he told Sherlock. “I was kinda there when he made that clear. Still a complete jerk, though.”

“But not my jerk.” Sherlock looked down, then up again, his cheeks glowing. The next words would not be easy, nor the unspoken confession that trailed after them, of arrogance and blindness and not seeing when he’d been used as a blind. And blunders, so many of them, and more painful than any of them, the knowledge that he had let down Gregory Lestrade. A better man would have spelled it all out, chapter and verse, but Sherlock lived in the age of instant messaging.   

“I’ve been wrong all along.”

“Oh, bloody hell.” The superintendent looked as if he were ready to keel over. 

“Sunshine…”

“But that doesn’t make me like him.” Sherlock clutched Lestrade’s arm like a lifeline, his voice sinking. “Greg, I swear it doesn’t, even if you think I know diddly-squat about –”

“Like who?” Lestrade cut him robustly. “Like James? Christ in heaven, no. You think I’m in any danger of taking you for him? Cold day in hell, Sherlock. Because you’re nothing, _nothing_ like that cold-eyed, cold-hearted, disgusting mucker-fucker…”

“ _Lestrade_!”

“Intercom’s off, sir. Listen, love. You know I’m not big on speeches…”

“Oh.” If his pulse hadn’t been rocketing into the flutter zone, Sherlock might have agreed.

“… or taking questions.” Lestrade grinned. “But you know me. I’m not one to fib, and I’ve always told you what’s what. Given you the rough end of truth since day one, and that’s not gonna stop. So if the question is, Sherlock Holmes, heart material? Then my answer is, oh yeah. Not half. And if you ask how long I’ve known, or plain how, or when… then yeah, you’ve got it wrong. Because it’s really, when haven’t I?”

“Oh...” And Sherlock, his face gleaming with relief, walked once again into Greg’s arms. A full-bodied hug it was, with Greg’s ear rubbing against his cheek, and then, as easily as some of Sherlock’s solutions fitted with their native riddles, their mouths came to meet. A light kiss, but carrying enough weight to leave Sherlock breathless for...

“More?” Greg’s hand was already roaming lower, where Sherlock’s stick-insect frame, as Mycroft used to call it, bloomed in flesh and curve. His smile could have warmed the entire division. “More evidence, sweetheart?” 

Sherlock, wild-haired, ecstatic, brought them together again at the hips. “ _Hard_ evidence,” he whispered.

This was when a demure click was heard. The superintendent, bulky Northerner that he was, had actually reached the door unnoticed. And it said much for Sherlock’s velocity of thought that even as his mind worked on catching and comprehending every word of his Greg – his Greg! – it had recorded the sound. He arched himself against Lestrade, using the old baritsu move known as ‘lay the tiger to rest’ to push them against the edge of the desk. Greg’s arms flailed in the air before they looped themselves around Sherlock’s neck.

“Sherlock,” came the grunt from his lover-and-husband-to-be. “Sweetheart. We’re going to have sex, yeah, and a conversation that’s waited too long, and then we’ll have an even too-longer happy ending. But what we’re _not_ gonna have is a quickie on the Super’s desk. Now. Your place or mine?”

 

* * *

 

“You’ll be moving in, of course.” Sherlock stretched himself luxuriously across his bed, letting his head hang upside down over the edge. Mrs Hudson must have gone home before they did; his room was more pristine than he’d ever seen it, and there was a little sprig of heather in a glass, on his bedside table.

“Oh yeah?” Greg tickled the slender foot hosted in his lap. “What’s wrong with mine?”

“Nothing,” Sherlock lied, wriggling. “But we need a bigger place, because Mr Wody will insist on sharing it with us now and then. He's taking to the London life.” A sudden memory struck, causing him to lift his head in shocked realization. “Molly! I need to text her.”

“Heck, I’d clean forgotten about the little fella. Shall we check on him now?”

“No, I mean yes, I mean I have to text her you’ll be marrying me, not her. Better do these things in writing.”

“Sherlock…” Greg hauled his new fiancé into the crook of his arm, fighting the urge to let his hands and lips have their way with him all over again. “Molly’s shacking up with Donovan, not me. Didn’t she tell you? And Sal’s a good cop. Servant of the law. Won’t be rooting for bigamy any time soon.“ 

“Oh.” Sherlock shook his head at the startling news. “Always someone.” 

“They’ll be good to each other. Like us. Are you really annoyed?” 

Sherlock turned into the embrace, shaking his head once again. They had not gone very far on their first time, but Sherlock could see it flower into many other times, many happy returns of pleasure. Greg would be there for him in days of joy, and on days when Sherlock felt less joyful or too cheeky for his own good, Greg would... handle him with his full consent. Give him the warmth of his lap, Sherlock thought, and… and take a Royal Flush hand to Sherlock’s lower cheeks, making them quiver and bounce with delight, every stroke followed by the stroke of a hand.

“What are you wriggling for?” Greg laughed.

“Royal Flush hand,” Sherlock said happily.

Greg let that pass, although his creased forehead told Sherlock more about his resentment towards that flirtatious gamester, Seb Moran, than Greg would admit. They dozed in each other’s arms, until Sherlock giggled them awake.

“What now?” Greg asked, kissing the mutinous curls.

“Gregson will say it’s a sad business, no really, Strady, at least my bro got to shag a _finance_ consultant. Har, har.”

“And John and Mary will say, Well done, you big twat, now we have two babysitters on command.”

“And Mrs Hudson will say… no, I’m not even going there.” Sherlock snuggled into Lestrade’s warm shoulder and yawned.

“But what do _you_ say, sunshine?”

“I say… I say people will talk. Let them, George.” Sherlock smiled an impish smile at Greg’s emphatic roll of eyes. “No, I say ours will be a perfect union. I would settle for no less.”

“And so say all of us.” Greg tugged the sheets over them and leaned back against the pillow, while Sherlock curled up against him in a position that was all too quickly, and delightfully, becoming a habit. “Get some rest, love. And thanks for catching me a matchless match.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> A few notes and acknowledgements:
> 
> All my thanks to Grassle for betaing this from start to finish and doing a perfectly perfect job as usual. I'm so lucky to have you in my ESL life!
> 
> My gratitude also goes to the nonnies who helped me out with the DNA-coded cypher. I'm the very opposite of a science boffin and any remaining mistake is mine to claim.
> 
> I hope the Austen fans won't mind my jostling her timeline quite a bit: in _Emma_ , the "dance at the Crown Inn" takes place much earlier. I had to move it when it became the climax of the casefic.
> 
> James Moriarty does have a brother in the ACD canon, and his brother is also named James. (Sir Arthur was terrible at remembering names. Well, either that or he had something of a James kink - in one of the stories, Mary Watson calls John H. "James", something which inspired the popular "H = Hamish" theory). 
> 
> Donovan wears the tiny heart-shaped pendent at the beginning of The Sign of Three: it's quite visible during the Waters gang's arrest scene. (And I want the same for Christmas.)
> 
> Operation Jackpot was one of the Met's first major anti-corruption operation in the mid-nineties, following the creation of the ghost squad (detectives undercover tracking down the black sheep in the ranks). The words in italics quoted by Sherlock come from Deputy Commissioner Roy Clark's address to the press on the subject.
> 
> And Mr Knightley is actually called George!
> 
> Last but not least, bless all of you who followed that long trek of a fic to its finale!


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